Ufo Enemy Unknown

[Psyclone]

Hi there, sorry for posting yet another please help me topic about Ufo: Enemy Unkown, but in the various ones i looked at nothing seemed to describe my problem. I downloaded the game today and can get it to start up and play but all the graphics are blurred. For instance i can start a new game by randomly clicking the mouse over the screen(though i see roughly 5 evenly spaced out) and manage to get the game to respond, but there simply is no way of actually playing it properly. So please could anyone help? I've tried the compatibility tab in the properties, but little else thanks.

[Psyclone]

I've tried download the version from this site, but can't unzip it. What program do i need?

[Eagle of Fire]

You need WinZip to unzip the archive.

The graphic problem is a common problem with old games played from Windows. Try switching your resolution to 256 colors, it will probably solve the problem. Furthermore, it would be really less bothersome if you would only download DosBOX instead and run the game from there since it's about 98% sure you will run into speed problems anyways, which DosBOX handle well.

If you still don't want to use DosBOX you will need VDMSound to hear the sound.

You can find all those programs easily with a simple search in your prefered web searcher. I personnaly use Yahoo since an eternity.

[Psyclone]

Thanks for the help i have dosbox now.

[Guest]

Shame the game won't run in dosbox. It refuses to.

[JoM]

I also get this problem, something to do with "The game wasn't designed to run in MS-DOS mode".

[Tom Henrik]

If you downloaded the game from this site, it will have to .exe files.... one will have a blue icon and one will have a yellow icon. One is for DOS and the other is for WINDOWS. I think the blue one is for Windows.

[Havell]

Usually the blue icon will not work or is full of errors, I have never had problems when using the yellow icon so I use that all of the time.

[Eagle of Fire]

If you want to use DosBOX to run Xcom, then you need the MSDos version. The newer "updated for Windows" version will never work under a DOS environement.

Also, the newer version has very choppy sound (or so I heard, I've found and d/l the original version :D )

[JoM]

Care to link us to the original version? Or is that the one hosted on the site?

[Eagle of Fire]

I remember finding it with a link on this very board, but I can't seem to remember where exactly. Someone else might be able to give you more help on finding that link.

[Kosta]

You can find links to various versions here:

http://www.xcomdl.com/

Hope that helps

[Eagle of Fire]

That's the place. I use version 1.2 at the bottom of the page. :)

[MicahDG]

I am kind of late to the discussion here but maybe I can offer some info.

The blue icon .exe is the collector's edition game executable, which can only be run in a win32 or ntfs environment. Starting the game with this executable is quite often the cause of the garbled and blurry graphics. The yellow icon executable is f0dder's loader which correct the garbled graphics bug that is present in the collector's editions of both UFO and TFTD. But there are still a lot of bugs with the collector's edition.

If anyone else is having trouble with UFO crashing (no pun intended here) there is a good list of solutions here:
http://www.xcomufo.com/x1faq.html

The best solution these days seems to be using the dos version of the game with dosbox, but as you can see in the above link, there are several patched collector's edition .exe's that not only fix the graphics bug, but a host of other bugs, including correcting the game speed on all newer computers.

Hope it helps somebody.

[Eagle of Fire]

It is on that site that I have found how to make Apocalypse work on XP without DOSBox.

I never noticed there was also some help on Xcom 1 and 2 too, probably because I never ran into a problem when running those games. I am pretty sure that site is of a very high quality and can be trusted.