mackal

I think there might also be some open-source, or nagware tools that rip ISOs. Generally Alcohol 120 is better due to the fact it does more exact rips (subchannel data, etc.), but I think a lot of the older games, such Apoc, would be quite happy running with an ISO using other, standard tools. (Just google for "iso rip".) In fact, there is toooons of ISO rippers out there, so even if most of them are payware, most of them also provide free trial periods, so there's really tons of free evaluation copies to choose from. And I wouldn't be surprised if a (legitimate) free version of a ripper does not come up from time to time on http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/.

At which point wasn't your CD/DVD drive recognized? If Win XP recognizes your CD drive/disk, I would think there should be absolutely no problems with it underneath the VM. IMPORTANT this may not be obvious: to have access to the real/WinXP CD drive inside the Virtual Machine you first have to go to the VM's menu, the one on the VM window when NOT running in fullscreen (it reads "Action Edit CD Floppy Help"), click on "CD", and then click on "Use Physical Drive X:", where X is the drive letter of your real CD drive. I should have detailed this step earlier. In fact, the next day I fired up the VM for some more XCOM, and I forgot to do this; I couldn't figure out why the CD wouldn't read (thought the CD became "bad"/scratched overnight...) If you do not do this, the virtual CD drive is not "connected" to anything, hence naturally reports "no media in the drive"... Additionally, once you make yourself an .ISO of the CD, like I did, you instead use the option "CD > Capture ISO Image", and then point the ensuing dialog box at the ISO file you created. This saves you the hassle of popping the CD in the drive everytime you want to play. In fact, this gives me an idea, in case you really ARE having trouble with the CD drive under the VM. If this is really the case, than grab a demo version of Alcohol 120% or similar product that allows you to "rip" an ISO image of the CD, and then use the ISO in the manner described above. This will bypass any problems that the VM might have with the physical hardware/drivers of your CD drive...

Yeah, can't wait to try out some other old games on this VM. Mind you, one possible downside of the VM, with respect to DosBox, is that I don't think you can set the rate of emulation in the VM. So all those older games which assumed you had a machine which had a CPU clockspeed of exactly x MHz will run too fast. I guess it's time to load up MoSlo and the other slow-down tools, but I found they never worked as well as setting the emulation cycles in DosBox... Ah well, I guess I'll simply use DosBox for those games... Can't wait to try XCOM 1 on it... Hey, CHAOS GATE looks pretty nice! I've never heard of the game but just looked at some screens. Very nice! What's it play like? It looks XCOM-ish...

I bet that just means it's "not supported"... which often translates to "it works in most cases, but you are on your own regardless". Heh heh, didn't think it was going to be useful again? I had to dig too a bit. Luckily I have a few machines which are too old and underpowered to run anything else, so the CD wasn't very deeply hidden... If this VM runs many other older games this well too, and more gamers find out about it, I forsee MS starting to sell Win98 again...

Hmm... I don't have access to Home Edition... is it really hobbled that much, compared to the other versions? This VM stuff is technically fairly simply thing, I don't think it really uses any frills of the more feature-packed versions of the OS... Yes, that's a huge plus... I was afraid XCOM APOC's days were numbered when I noticed that development on VDMSound has stopped, but with this, APOC should be playable for many years yet. I hear ya. The golden rule for me is: "If it ain't broken, don't fix it." I'll be upgrading to Vista when MS forces me to, at gunpoint. Well, maybe not gunpoint... more likely I'll succumb to it once some must-play game is released which ONLY runs under Vista, for no particular reason (other than blackmail)

That seems to be the effect for me, but others will have to check whether this still holds on other machines and other OSes (say, Win95, rather than the Win98SE I'm using...). Well, technically this is not quite a DosBox equivalent... the MS product is a generic VM, capable of running any guest operating system, whereas DosBox (i.e., dosbox.sf.net) is a DOS-specific VM-like on-the-fly interpreter... I am actually surprised that the generic MS VM is doing better than DosBox... but I guess that has to do with MS having greater access to the murky little secrets and undocumented issues of their OSes... Definitely the more solutions out there, the more likely one is to get XCOM running on even newer systems. Good luck if you try the Virtual PC route, although at this point I would not bother and just enjoy the heck out of the game since you got it up and running...

Yes, I was quite shocked I've never heard or seen anything about this before either. Mind you, it is quite possible that way back then MS Virtual PC was not free, hence few would even bother trying it out. Also, it's possible XCOM Apoc under MS Virtual PC did not run smoothly on typical hardware/CPUs available in 2004 (the blogger might have had one powerful rig... he did/does work for Microsoft after all)... BTW, another cool thing with a VM approach like this: when you're done playing for the day, you can just "save state" (File > Close > Save state) of the virtual machine; next time you fire up the VM, it will come up exactly as you left it (i.e., Windows 98 fully up, and XCOM Apoc already running). Very handy!

Makes total sense if you feel less than comfortable mucking about with your PC more than you need to. I will just add, as an additional incentive for you, should you ever decide to try out this approach, that the MS Virtual PC 2007 interface is surprisingly simple, especially for a virtual machine app. It is a Microsoft product, after all (well, an MS bought-out-then-repackaged product). Installing Windows 98 (on the virtual HDD, which is just a single, simple file on your real hard-disk) is by far the most "technologically sophisticated" part of the whole process. Since the whole virtual PC runs in a window by default, and writes only to a handful of files (one representing the virtual PC, one representing the virtual HD, and possible one or two others) there is really little room that I can see for any devastating consequences (aside from bug in MS Virtual PC itself)... it really feels and acts as if you were simply running your favourite spreadsheet or word processing program. In any case, I don't have much time (I fired off the post for posterity, in case in the future I have to install XCOM on another machine and forget all the details), but if others find this works well for them, perhaps someone could throw together a more exact step-by-step walkthrough of the procedure, to help the more technologically-hesitant in the audience...

I am just writing for posterity of a new way I found to run XCOM Apocalypse, which seems terribly easy and is the most robust solution I have found to date. On my new box (E6600 dual-core 2.4GHz machine) I could not get any of the other ways to work reliably. DosBox 7.0 worked most of the time, but significant sound stuttering, and hangs whenever a dialog box popped up (e.g., when you click on your base in the CityScape screen, which then shows a dialog box of the agents within the building). I could not get VDMSound approach to work on this machine, despite this being my preferred way to get XCOM Apoc to run on the previous machine. Just setting compatibility settings in WinXP didn't do much, always resulted in a black screen of nothingness. With Virtual PC 2007 the whole process was absolutely painless, Apoc runs beautifully, zero sound stuttering. INGREDIENTS: * (free!) MS Virtual PC 2007; you can download this for free from Microsoft websites: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/...pc/default.mspx * Windows 95/98 install media (I used Win98 SE) * XCOM Apoc (I used originals initially, but I ripped the CD with Alcohol 120% and the ISO works equally well!) STEPS: These are fairly obvious: * start install of MS Virtual PC 2007 * create a new virtual PC instance (IMPORTANT: select a Win98 virtual machine!!!) * during the install/first run of it create a new virtual hard drive * plop Win 95/98 CD into drive * from virt PC menu tell it to use your real/physical CD drive as the CD drive for the virt PC * reboot virt PC * start a Win98 install now; have the installation format that virtual HD you created, and then install the system to it * follow the usual Windows95/98 install procedure * once that is done, plop your XCOM CD into CD bay, run install as usual, etc. * possibly run the setup for XCOM to setup the sound * then just run the game * you can rip the XCOM CD to an ISO (I used Alcohol 120%) and have virt PC use the ISO directly; this avoids delays in reading the CD, saves your drive, and in my case no CD spin up noise/vibrations... COSTS: * HDD: very little; although the virtual HD by default can expand to 16 Gigs (this is settable during virt HD creation), it takes little space at the moment, just the space for Win98 + XCOM APOC; virt PC itself seemed pretty tiny * time: 1 hour or so, the bulk of course taken by the OS install process, which runs basically at realtime, at least on my machine NOTES: * IMPORTANT: check the following page for 3 pointers to prevent problems with running XCOM Apoc: http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archi.../15/257408.aspx This was the site that actually clued me in onto the MS Virt PC approach... Good luck!

Are there any financial costs to a "scientist-swap"? That is, does firing your 83-skill scientist and hiring an 84-skill one result in any change in your bank balance? I can't test right now... I had a suspicion that scientist, other than their weekly cost, also had a "hiring fee" of some sort, no? Which would mean swapping a 75-skill scientist for a 90-skill one would be worthwhile, but doing the same upgrade using a number of swaps (say 75-to-77, 77-to-80, 80-to-82, etc...) would be just too darned costly...

Thanks for the great replies. Actually I'm noticing it doesn't matter much once you get your Marsec suits... flying in "run" mode does not seem to eat stamina. So I always have my grunts in "run" mode, and just make sure they fly everywhere. Well, not quite; I make them run for real from time to time, to have them train their stamina...

What purpose does Stamina serve? I think I've read somewhere, as a sidenote, that when stamina runs out any subsequent running incurs "walking" time costs (in the turn-based mode), meaning that given the same number of time points at start of turn you can't cover as much ground as when the agent is fresh. Are there any other side-effects? Is there a good source elsewhere that describes the effects of Stamina (or all the stats, for that matter)?

What determines the order of XCOM agents within a squad, in a tactical mission? Dragging and dropping the agents around always produces the same order, no matter what I do on the squad assignment screen (right before the mission is started)... Is there anyway to override it? (sometimes it'd be nice to have a particular agent in the first slot, say if he's carrying a motion sensor, etc.)