OpenCol 0.2.0

OpenCol 0.2.0 brings sound and music, ready-made builds for Windows, and no more command line: put OpenCol into your game's folder and start it.

OpenCol is Sid Meier's Colonization for DOS (version 3.0, February 1995), decompiled and rebuilt as a modern program that plays exactly like the original. You need your own copy of the DOS game (as sold by GOG and Steam): OpenCol contains nothing of the game.

What's new #

• Sound and music. The original's own Sound Blaster driver plays the AdLib music and the digitized sound effects, on an emulated card. --no-sound plays without.
• Windows, 64-bit and 32-bit, and macOS for both Apple silicon and Intel.
• No setup. Put OpenCol into the folder of your game (the one with VICEROY.EXE) and start it. It saves its games there, as the original does. --game FOLDER still works from anywhere.
• One program to play, opencol. The window-less one the tests use is no longer in the download.

Play #

1. Download the zip for your system below and unpack it.
2. Put what it contains into the folder of your copy of the game, the one with VICEROY.EXE (in the GOG version, the COLONIZE folder):
   • Windows: opencol.exe and SDL2.dll (windows-x64 for 64-bit Windows, windows-x86 for 32-bit).
   • macOS: opencol and SDL2.framework.
3. Start opencol.

macOS asks first, because OpenCol is not signed by Apple: right-click opencol and choose Open, or run xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine . in the folder.

F11 or Alt+Enter switches to full screen. On Linux, build from source (see the README).

Still exactly the original #

The 71 recorded scenarios (51,711 checkpoints: the whole game state, every screen, every saved game) are still identical with the original, and 495 functions still match its machine code one by one. The Windows, macOS Intel and macOS Apple silicon builds write the same saved games, byte for byte.

As in the original, a game with music is a little different every time: when a tune ends, the game reseeds its random numbers.

Limits of this release #

• The Sound Blaster and AdLib sound only. The original's Roland MT-32 and General MIDI drivers are not supported: OpenCol always plays the Sound Blaster's, whatever your CONFIG.COL says.
• No changes to the game yet. This release is the original, bugs included. Fixes and new features come next; open an issue for the ones you want.