Charlie's Thoughts

Every now and then I get the urge to build a 5-star tower, listen to the power line sound effect from Sim City 2000, or report heavy traffic from the cockpit of SimCopter. So when the latest urge struck, I immediately headed over to Abandonia to pick up some games, but quickly ran into problems.

First off, you've probably heard that downloading games is illegal. Well that's usually the case. However when you get as old as I am, some games start to expire and fall into a category of game called Abandonware. It's a moving definition, but generally includes games that are too old for the original manufacterer to distribute it anymore (Or to make a profit from it). Searching abandonware will yield plenty of sites distributing games.

After downloading, SimTower, SimCity, and SimCopter, I tried to install them, only to find they would not install. Now these games are old. They are from the 16-bit game era. Most modern operating systems since Windows 95 are 32-bit, and now the move towards 64-bit systems is occuring. The problem is that Microsoft doesn't include 16-bit support in their 64-bit OSes. Since I have Windows 7 64-bit, I cannot natively play 16-bit games. Well that just wouldn't do so I set off to find alternatives.

Solution:
After a bit of looking, I came across two options. The first is called VirtualBoxing. It is essentially running an OS within an OS. Usually this requires you to have the second OS, but I came across VMLite which auto-installs Windows XP for you. (Windows XP supports 16-bit software). Minutes later, I was off!

I also ran across a second (Un-tested) solution. This essentially kills off the current OS while your program is running, so not as useful, but easy to try, lightweight, and no risk! If something goes wrong hit ctrl-alt-delete, bring up task manager, go to data-new task, and put in "explorer". Anyways:

Take the below code, save it as a .bat file (Batch File), save and run!

taskkill /f /IM explorer.exe
(Put your app.exe here)
pause
start explorer.exe

Hope it works for you. Let me know. Also, I've listened to the noise 200 times and I'm 90% sure that the power line noise is actually a guy just going "BZZZZZZZZT".

UPDATE: After experiencing numerous problems playing simcopter with "An unrecoverable error has occurred and SimCopter must quit. Do you want to try and save the game". I found the following thread:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=7047874&postcount=17
Turns out fast CPUs break the game (Which I should have known from trying to play Jetfighter 3). The solution? Just burn off extra CPU cycles using CPUGrabber. The link in the thread doesn't work, but you can google it. Ahhh, the good old games that go as fast as your CPU can...love it...