My interest in X-COM seems to go through phases and right now I'm in the phase again, but since the last phase I've installed Vista and when I went to run UFO (both DOS and CE) I found that it doesn't work at all. The DOS version simply crashes and the CE one runs with audio but no video, just a black screen.

Needless to say, I'm a sad boy

According to the 2K guys, there seem to be problems with Vista compatibility. And with no source code, they can't do anything about it.

I tried running them in 'Windows 95' compatibility mode and it did absolutely nothing.

Now, that's what you get for purposedly installing Vista

Did you try DOSBox?

No. Does it run under Vista?

It does, yes. Otherwise I can only really recommend installing a virtual machine. You could probably dedicate a gigabyte of space to one without eating too much into your primary storage, and that'd handle no end of older games.

There's a very easy-to use program called easyBCD. I decided to give it a go, and checked the following tutorial:

http://apcmag.com/5485/dualbooting_vista_and_xp

If you follow that you can get XP installed as a dual-boot with your vista installation, without having to format drives or lose any data. You might want to give it a go. It really is simple, and the guide on that webpage, while far longer than it needs to be, will take you right through the process.

As much as I love UFO, I'm not sure I can be bothered doing duel boots and such just for 1 game...

Did DOSBox not work for you?

It sounded too complicated to set up, talking about making special folders and mounting them or something. I got confused. I'm a simple person when it comes to software. I need programs that say, "Do you want to install?" then you click "Yes" and it's all done and you can run it

It's so simple it hurts.
You start dosbox.
you type: mount c <path to your UFO folder, for example: c:\games\ufo>
type: c:[enter]
type: ufo[enter]

and you're ready to go.

Needless to say, you have to have the dos version of the game, CE won't work.

I haven't used dosbox as much as I'd like, but if you've got a whole lot of games that you'd like to play in a dos environment, you could easily store them all onto the same drive or directory, and just mount the whole thing. Then navigate to the respective games the good old fashioned way via the command prompt and run them from there. Old fashioned games call for old fashioned means.

I think you can also make a batch file with all the right mounting commands (and perhaps load any other TSRs that you might need, like sound or mouse emulators) and then just run that from then on whenever you feel like playing one of your vintage games.

- NKF

You can actually include commands in the shortcut you use to run DosBox by adding "-c" arguments to the target line.

For example, you could copy and paste the original DosBox shortcut and then edit it. The standard target line looks something like this:


Now say you added the execution commands to the list:


Once you've done this, you could rename the shortcut to something more appropriate, perhaps change the icon if you're so inclined.

For some programs you can also add an "exit" command, which makes DosBox shut itself down when the actual game ends. Doesn't work for UFO though (as it uses a batch file for execution, this messes things up a bit).