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[Eagle of Fire]

Okay guys. I have a problem and I think people from Abandonia could help me sort it out.

I have a game I'm supposed to make a review of: Outpost 2. I know that game fine and all but I wanted to play it again to make sure those memory are fresh and to try to spur the will to actually write the review.

The problem is minor but is quite an annoyance. There is radial buttons in this game, which are used to select the difficulty and some options. I can play the game without being able to click on those buttons but the default options is always the easy difficulty. Which kind of suck.

Now, this is kind of a recent problem because I clearly remember the game working flawlessly only a few years ago. The last time I played this game must have been 2 years top and this problem was not present at the time. I suspect either corruption or a new driver which kind of mess up with this old game but I uninstalled and reinstalled the game (I own the CD) and it doesn't help...

So of course I tried to find a patch to try to solve the problem which might well happen to future users who download the game on newer computers (this is a Windows game...)... But I simply can't find one for the sake of whatever and everything you want.

So, two questions for this problem:

1- Anybody have an idea what is the origin of this problem? Driver? Codec? Direct X? (The game install do mention Indiego drivers or something but state that I already have higher version installed and skip it)

2- Anybody have an idea if a patch actually exist?

Thank you for anybody who can help with this.

[The Fifth Horseman]

What version of Windows are you running this in?

[Eagle of Fire]

Windows XP SP1. Which I beleive should be a good thing rather than a bad thing in this situation.

I don't remember updating anything relevant in the past years to account for this change.

However, digging in my CD, I've found this (my game is in French):

I. MATERIEL MINIMUM REQUIS
-----------------------

* Windows(R) 95/NT 4.0 ou plus
* Un compatible PC équipé d'un processeur Pentium cadencé à 60 MHz ou plus
* 16 Mo de RAM
* CD-Rom double vitesse (x2)
* Au moins 50 Mo d'espace libre sur le disque dur.
* Carte vidéo SVGA supportant une résolution de 640 x 480 en couleurs 16-bits .)
* Carte son compatible DirectX et prise en charge par Windows 95
* DirectX(TM) 3 est nécessaire pour le son et certaines options d'affichage.

Which translate into: DirectX(TM) 3 is required for sound and some graphic options.

I guess this is related. Maybe the version of DirectX I use right now is not compatible anymore with what DirectX 3 offered back in the days...

This list give me an idea. I'll try running the game in Windows 95 compatibility mode to see if it change anything.

[The Fifth Horseman]

I'm getting the same on SP3. However, it looks like the problem isn't that you can't change the settings, but rather merely that the setting indicator is not displayed. Try starting the Plymouth campaign and see for yourself.

Alternatively, there's a hacked version at outpostuniverse.net, which does not suffer from this issue.

[Eagle of Fire]

Yes, I've come across a site which give out a free version which is "patched" with fan made corrections. I'm not sure this is relevant tough. We would need to make sure that those "corrections" are only platform wise and did not in fact change gameplay to support multiplayer or something.

Also I did try to change settings but failed. I'll try again, maybe I didn't try hard enough or missed a click or something.

[Scatty]

Do you have the Windows fonts set to Large setting? I did encounter rarely some games by less known developers, made for Windows 98, which didn't display properly on fonts set to Large or higher, custom resolution, which is normally the default on today's high resolution monitors. Screen cut off, buttons or control elements completely missing etc. Some advised to change fonts to Small, some didn't.
Try setting it to Small fonts if you have it on Large, maybe it'll help.

[Eagle of Fire]

Problem here is that I have actually no idea where that option may be in XP. Never messed up with those and I don't even remember seeing it somewhere...

[RRS]

right-click on desktop -> Properties -> Appearance tab -> Font size

Perhaps you should show us a screenshot of the actual problem?

[Scatty]

Originally Posted by RRS

right-click on desktop -> Properties -> Appearance tab -> Font size

Perhaps you should show us a screenshot of the actual problem?

Not exactly. Sorry for the confusion, it's not the font setting. The problem those games I mentioned had with is actually a DPI setting which makes everything larger including fonts, located on the Settings tab. There click on Advanced -> General, there at the top set the DPI setting to Normal size if it is on anything else than Normal. You'd need to restart the computer each time you change the setting, though.

[Eagle of Fire]

Got it.

That setting is at normal on my computer and I don't remember ever playing with this.

It is set to 96pp as default.