Journal of Tormod Haugen

It is that time again. I delve back into the oasis of great games from the past, looking to find my childhood. Silly, isn’t it? I carry my childhood with me, hoping to be as good a parent as mine before me.

Spurred by people talking about GOG.com, I managed to get my hands on Fallout and Fallout 2, for the price of a cup of coffee and a light lunch at my favorite coffee bar.

Download and install went as well as it should, though I was a bit shocked to see Tim Cain as the Fallout icon. This happens for both Fallout and Fallout 2, as his image is hidden in the 48×48 pixel version of the icon. Phew.

I went on the net finding high resolution patches for both Fallout and Fallout 2 at NMA. Reading the Readme I installed the patch, knowing I could get it uninstalled by running the patcher again.

I changed the patch’s ini file to set my resolution to 1280×1024, and started the game. Which crashed with a message that it couldn’t set resolution to 640×480. A bit of research put the blame on the file ddraw.dll in the game directory. I removed it (by renaming it to ddraw.dll), making the game revert to Windows’ version (installed with DirectX and/or the gfx card drivers?), then it worked just nice. I also read that this was due to ATI drivers - and since the game works without the high res patch, with the supplied ddraw.dll, I guess it is supplied to avoid the problem in the first part. Possibly the packaged ddraw.dll allows 640×480 res, breaking the high res patch.

A fix sets the color (bit depth) to 16 bits, avoiding a screen blackout bug - this might or might not have been fixed in GOG’s version of Fallout, but with this set in the patch’s ini file you won’t get the loading screens.

Edit: I also had some problems in the Rad Scorpion caves outside of Shady Sands. When I entered the map, I couldn’t scroll around, and even the exit area was outside of the screen. efin says in the GOG forums:

Also, I don’t know if anyone else has had this problem, but with the hi-res pack I couldn’t go anywhere in the radscorpion cave. I could move around the screen, but I couldn’t scroll to go anywhere else other than the first bit you c an see. It appears to be wrong numbers put into an .ini file.

If you have this problem, go to the “f1_res” folder and open “map_edges_F1.ini” - in it you’ll see the edges mapped out by number for each section of the game. Here is what I have for the Caves section:

NAME = CAVES
ELEVATION = 1
LEFT_EDGE = 1568
RIGHT_EDGE = 2540
TOP_EDGE = 1840
BOTTOM_EDGE = 1532

I’m not sure if these are accurate, but they worked for me. Have fun!

So, now it is time to start the fun.

Update: It is given away.

I was so lucky to receive a code from a random passer by, and as I was told I could give one on myself, I thought I’d pass it on.

Therefore, if anyone would like to try and buy some Good Old Games from GOG.com, feel free to ask me for a invite code. First come, first served. My email address is made up from my handle “tormodh” and the domain of Google’s popular email client - “gmail.com”, or you could drop a line in the comments below. Email entered in the field (for email) will not be shown to others than me.

More info (same links as supplied by Mart):

• The main Good Old Games site
• Old’s Cool at gamesindustry.biz
• CD Projekt: Publishers “scared” to go DRM-Free