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Comment by wing-_-nuts | Hacker News Reader

If gog ever manages to get the rights to rerelease civ II, I'd gladly pay $80 for a copy I could just click and run on windows and linux. Yes, there are copies on abandonware sites, but the sound is almost always jank, the soundtrack is gone and the advisors don't work (they really added a lot of character to the game!). The nostalgia of childhood is broken. I've tried everything, up to and including running win 3.1 with sound blaster drivers on dosbox to no avail. This is my white whale

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Is this an emulation problem or are the online copies corrupted? You can buy an original copy of the game on eBay and run it in Dosbox-X or Dosbox-staging, both well ahead vanilla Dosbox in features.

Also, I bet the Internet archive or exoDOS will have a perfect copy. The latter is a one click experience. Check the laws in your country for whether these are legal.

There's a number of active communities about still playing the game, including /r/alphacentauri on reddit, a discord server at https://discord.gg/7BkcvXUX , and https://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?action=community

I know the last time I picked it up, there were a well respected set of patches from scient (a quick google pointed me to https://github.com/DrazharLn/scient-unofficial-smacx-patch ). Somewhere in here is a pre-done distribution you can just click and run with for modern windows.

Run The Macintosh edition CivII Gold using PPC Mac Emulation on Windows (Basilisk or whatever you find easiest) or run it on x64 Windows using the civ2xp64patcher that you can find online. You can get a full image including soundtrack/advisors on a variety of abandonware sites.

I'm sure it's not worth the effort, but I would love to see remakes of these games.

The simplicity of early Civs with a modern, fully baked interface. Maybe with hexes instead of squares if that doesn't break the game. FreeCiv exists, but it doesn't feel modern either.

I honestly don't get the love for hexes

It removes the difference between edge neighbors and corner neighbors?

yep, it removes another tactical modifier from already simple positioning

and you no longer can do nice square grid for your buildings or 90 degree positioning

Civ V and earlier have all the buildings in the city square, so I don't see how that applies?

With hexes, I like how you can move in any direction and see the same number of new tiles; with squares, you're compelled to walk in diagonals to see more stuff and it feels icky.

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