DescentBB

Descent 2 is one of my all time favorite games. I used to run it on an old HP 7170 with a Monster Voodoo card but the display and the CD ROM drive have bitten the dust and I would like to put the game on a newer HP 733 Pentium 3, Win98SE with 256 megs of RAM and a TNT2 video card. Will the D2X-XL version run on this machine, (I know that it is slightly below the recommended specs) or will I have to run it in plain OpenGL mode? I presently have Descent 3 on this machine and it works fine but I would prefer to play Descent 2, which is in my opinion, a far better game. Also, will the Descent 2 install mess up my Descent 3 setup?

Yes. You just won't be able to use some of the graphical additions.

Also, D2 and D3 are in seperate directories so there won't be any conflicts.

Thanks, I'll give it a try and if it works, my Voodoo card will be retired and I just might frame it and hang it on the wall.
The only reason I asked about the possible install conflict is because Microsoft Flight Simulator is notorious for altering or deleting the previous or later version's EXE. file, if you have another version on your hard drive already.

Ummm, from memory. D2X-XL has probs with Win98/SE versions. Though maybe not anymore?

SourceForge site wrote:D2X-XL supports the following Operating System : 32-bit MS Windows (NT/2000/XP), Linux, OS X.

You can try it, but if it doesn't work, there is the next best thing, DXX-Rebirth.

Update 3/28/07: Now supports Win9x/ME OS.

Diedel wrote:D2X-XL v1.9.166 on Windows 9x/ME

A D2X-XL user from Brazil contacted me about the software these days: He had problems getting it to run on his rather outdated, low end machine (AMD Duron 750 MHz, 128 MB RAM, Geforce MX 440, Windows ME). One problem was that my executable had been produced with Microsoft Visual C .NET 2003, hence requiring additional DLLs (msvcr71.dll) to run. I had switched to .NET because the latest SDL versions referenced Windows API elements that were only accessible with MSVC 6 by installing the Windows platform SDK and a processor pack, while they compiled with .NET without a hitch.

The guy knew something about source ports and coding, so I gave him my old MSVC 6 projects, and he managed to come up with an almost working solution (only problem was an unresolved reference which was easy to fix). The advantage of that executable is that it doesn't need any of the dlls the .NET version needs, so I figured it might work on 16 bit Windows versions and added it to the Windows D2X-XL distribution (d2x-xl-win16.exe). Of course flawless operation on these OS's isn't guaranteed ... but you can try.

How about the d2x-0.2.0_mingw.zip OpenGL patch from the Planet Descent website, any experiences with that one using Win 98SE?

tunnelcat wrote:How about the d2x-0.2.0_mingw.zip OpenGL patch from the Planet Descent website, any experiences with that one using Win 98SE?

It works, but its VERY VERY VERY VERY old. I would seriously recommend using Rebirth if at all possible.

Thanks all. I'll give DXX_Rebirth a try.