Blade Runner game

[rodneyfaile]

I am a big fan of Blade Runner, but I have never played the game. Have been meaning to get it for a while but never got around to it.

Picked one up off Amazon, it arrived yesterday popped the disc into the slot and ..... it wouldn't play because I have Windows 7 64 bit.
My old laptop died about a week ago which is now extra depressing because I am sure it would have been able to play it.

I browsed the net looking for some way to configure setting so I could play it. Nothing worked.
So what are my options? Find an old computer running Windows 95 or something?

 

[Skor]

You could always download VMWare, make yourself a virtual XP 32-bit machine and run it from there - if your PC is fairly beefy it should be fine.

You could use http://www.vmware.com/products/server/overview.html to do it, I have done in the past for more resource hungry programs than Blade Runner.

 

[Solo4114]

You might be able to find a Win-compatible copy of it on sites like Good Old Games.

 

[Wes R]

Come to think of it I haven't tried my copy on Vista, it won't run with the PC running in compatibility mode? I remember when the game came out and it was demanding on your system, I know when i had it running on ME it took forever to find a file that was needed for some reason.

 

[28injection]

Isnt there an XP mode option in Windows 7? It runs on Xp just fine.

 

[CessnaDriver]

Look into compatiblity mode.
I think under the executable properties you can tell it to treat it as if it was XP.
Might take a little googling but I bet you can get it going on Win 7.

 

[Wes R]

I think compatibly mode goes all the way back to windows 95 but i'd go with the newest one you know it works on. Once you get it going I wish you luck on getting all the endings cause even with the strategy guide it's a pain.

 

[Skor]

Essentially Win 7 XP mode require virtualisation anyway, and only works on higher end copies of Win 7... VM ware is normally a cheaper way of doing the same thing:

Windows XP Mode - Windows 7 features - Microsoft Windows

 

[rodneyfaile]

Compatibility mode did not work. I tried configuring it to several different previous versions of Windows and still kept getting the same error. Something along the lines of "this 64bit version of Windows does not support your 16 bit program".

Might try downloading Windows XP mode next.

Anyone else have this game and run it on Windows 7 64 bit?

 

[darth_myeek]

google windows 95 emulator

 

[androidandy]

This has been an issue with all the fans of this game for a while now. I still have not heard of a situation that has worked yet. It had issues on XP from what I remember as well. Good luck with this, because i would love to play this game again myself.

Andy

 

[rodneyfaile]

:unsure

 

[Wes R]

Windows 7 sucks for playing any old games, i have trouble with most of them. Even the new windows 7 versions of fallout 1,2, and tactics have issues.

 

[Skor]

If you don't fancy the virtual machine route, try DOSbox:

DOSBox, an x86 emulator with DOS

It's very effective for older games. Don;t give up hope, there's always a way.

 

[Alan Cross]

I played this game back in the day. Pros: Atmospheric and ambitious in recapturing the mood of the film. The sound design was great.

Cons: As a game, it kind of sucked. Lots of point and click. Lame action scenes. Dull.

Though it begs the question, could someone make a cool Bladerunner game using the state of the art gaming technology today?

 

[Wes R]

I'm amazed they haven't put this game on Steam yet. I think this thing was cutting edge when it came out. I think they could make one but no doubt it would just be a FPS with next to no storyline.

 

[Skor]

I remember Blade Runner being the very first game to need more than 1gig of hard disk space when installed.

I'm going to go find myself a copy now.

 

[rodneyfaile]

This has been an issue with all the fans of this game for a while now. I still have not heard of a situation that has worked yet. It had issues on XP from what I remember as well. Good luck with this, because i would love to play this game again myself.

Andy

Thought I would try again. Still no success.

I would love to play this game.

 

[aeonpulse]

I dug out my old copy last year, did some reasearch, and after copying the contents of all four discs to my hard drive, making a bunch of manual changes to the configuration files, and installing some fan-made patches, I was able to get the game running. Unfortunately, I encountered several issues that made the game unplayable.

There are several points in the game where you are expected to react within a certain time limit, otherwise you die. For instance, at one point you discover a bomb in a building, and have to get a certain distance away from the front door before the explosion, or you're dead. Normally, with the game running properly on a Windows 95/98 machine, you have about 10 seconds, which is more than enough. (I remember clearly, I played through this game several times back in the late 90s, and never had an issue with it.) But on today's machines, the game only gives you about 3 seconds. That simply is not enough time to get outside of the blast radius, no matter how hard you try. The problem is that our processors are just too powerful, and for whatever reason, causes these issues. I even tried opening several applications and games in the background to drag down my processor, which helped alittle, but not enough. After discovering this, I even tried installing a virtual machine and playing on that, hoping the vm would throttle my processor. No difference.

Point being, getting the game running on your Windows 7 machine wouldn't even be worth the effort. We're just going to have to wait till GOG.com finally decides to re-release it.

 

[rodneyfaile]

.....point being, getting the game running on your windows 7 machine wouldn't even be worth the effort...

.