2K Games Liberates Railroad Tycoon, only Elysium cares

Railroad Tycoon is now freeware.

Download includes the full game, manual, reference cards, etc.

Go forth, and build ye some choo-choos.

I will give 'er a whirl and see what all the hubub is about. We'll see what this E-Lee-See-Um character has been going on for.

Once they find a way to make railroads in World of Warcraft, I don't think we'd ever see Elysium again

I care and I am not a bearded hippie. I think..

That's great! I think my old one is on 5.25" floppies.

Stylez wrote:

Once they find a way to make railroads in World of Warcraft, I don't think we'd ever see Elysium again :)

:LOL:

Ah, yes, the Kalimdor Choo-Choo expansion. Elysium will roll up a goblin transportation tycoon character and dominate the Horde's industrial revolution.

14M for the full game? Inconceivable!

I remember back when I first got Ultima VII. The special "Enhanced for Modern 386 Systems" version it was. It came on a huge stack of floppy disks (the box weighed like 6 pounds with the manual -- that's right, the manual) and took up an unreal 21MB of my 40MB hard disk. Some of the young'uns here might laugh at that, but back then that was the equivalent of a game coming on like 5 DVDs today. The game also required Expanded Memory as opposed to the more commonly used Extended Memory (that's right kids, there used to be different types of ways to allocate your system memory), but still needed like 610K of free conventional memory. They had a boot disk maker (a special floppy disk you booted off of when you needed a special voodoo startup configuration for a specific game) which worked sometimes, but if it didn't or you just liked a challenge/pain like I did, you'd spend hours tweaking your startup applications, their parameters, memory allocations and startup orders to hit the sweet spot. And even then, the game ran like molasses in wet sand, loaded constantly and took 45 seconds to create each 300K+ saved game. But dang blasted, we loved it and spent hours playing that game! Hearing The Guardian speak in the intro (with lip sync no less) was possibly one of the most surreal gaming experiences I've ever had. I owe much of the troubleshooting knowledge I now use in my job to experiences like that. Ahh those were the days...

...and oh yeah, get of my lawn!

They had a boot disk maker (a special floppy disk you booted off of when you needed a special voodoo startup configuration for a specific game)

The Lucasarts bootdisk creator that came with Tie Fighter is still my #1 bootdisk of all time.

I still have the original box for Railroad Tycoon, with the floppies, no less. The one with Bill Gates on the cover, looking like a robber baron. Come on, it is Gates, right?

Parallax Abstraction wrote:

I remember back when I first got Ultima VII. The special "Enhanced for Modern 386 Systems" version it was. It came on a huge stack of floppy disks (the box weighed like 6 pounds with the manual -- that's right, the manual) and took up an unreal 21MB of my 40MB hard disk. Some of the young'uns here might laugh at that, but back then that was the equivalent of a game coming on like 5 DVDs today. The game also required Expanded Memory as opposed to the more commonly used Extended Memory (that's right kids, there used to be different types of ways to allocate your system memory), but still needed like 610K of free conventional memory. They had a boot disk maker (a special floppy disk you booted off of when you needed a special voodoo startup configuration for a specific game) which worked sometimes, but if it didn't or you just liked a challenge/pain like I did, you'd spend hours tweaking your startup applications, their parameters, memory allocations and startup orders to hit the sweet spot. And even then, the game ran like molasses in wet sand, loaded constantly and took 45 seconds to create each 300K+ saved game. But dang blasted, we loved it and spent hours playing that game! Hearing The Guardian speak in the intro (with lip sync no less) was possibly one of the most surreal gaming experiences I've ever had. I owe much of the troubleshooting knowledge I now use in my job to experiences like that. Ahh those were the days...

...and oh yeah, get of my lawn! :)

I still keep an old computer with 6-gig harddrive that I sometimes fire up. It is my "DOSBox", so to speak, configured for playing the old games the old way. So funny when the boot menu comes up, asking whether I want to start up with maximum extended, expanded or conventional memory. And Smartdrive, do not forget that. The young whippersnappers do not remember the time when you could literally feel the impact of caching on system speed.

Yes I do remember that. When I upgraded to 8MB RAM for the first time, I allocated like 3MB of it to write-behind caching and it was astounding what a difference it made. No more ten seconds to write that WordPerfect 5.1 file for me. Multi-floppy installations also went so much faster with it.

When I upgraded to 8MB RAM for the first time, I allocated like 3MB of it to write-behind caching and it was astounding what a difference it made.

Never mind that, Earthseige only used the hi-res textures with 8mb. Damn that game ruled.

Stylez wrote:
When I upgraded to 8MB RAM for the first time, I allocated like 3MB of it to write-behind caching and it was astounding what a difference it made.

Never mind that, Earthseige only used the hi-res textures with 8mb. Damn that game ruled.

Same for System Shock, the first (floppy) version. How I longed to have 8mb to enjoy "hi-res" textures. By the way, the CD version still gets play on my DOS machine, the 640x480 mode is not bad for a DOS game. Plus spoken voicemails amended the atmosphere nicely.

Parallax Abstraction wrote:

Yes I do remember that. When I upgraded to 8MB RAM for the first time, I allocated like 3MB of it to write-behind caching and it was astounding what a difference it made. No more ten seconds to write that WordPerfect 5.1 file for me. Multi-floppy installations also went so much faster with it.

SMARTDRV.EXE was the bomb. But woe to those who turned off their machines before the cache got flushed!

Parallax Abstraction wrote:

The game also required Expanded Memory as opposed to the more commonly used Extended Memory (that's right kids, there used to be different types of ways to allocate your system memory), but still needed like 610K of free conventional memory.

I remember Ultima VII featuring some sort of crazy Voodoo Memory Manager system (VMM) that would help me free up conventional memory. I had to learn a lot about computers to get my damn games running.

Malor wrote:

*cough*

Yes, but your headline was boring.

Yes, but your headline was boring.

LOL... apparently so.