Gerall’s Blog

Long ago, in the barbaric year 1994, the primitive game company MicroProse produced a little gem called Master of Magic. In this game, there were 5 “colors” of magic, White, Black, Green, Red, and Blue. You create settlements and grow population bases. You field troops from humble, conscripted Spearmen up to things like Fire Giants and Sky Drakes.

Sounds like Magic the Gathering, doesn’t it?

This is the game I was playing back when the Magic the Gathering craze hit the gaming world in 1995. I didn’t buy a deck of MtG cards for something like another 10 years when I somehow ended up hearing about a MtG block called Odyssey. I cut my MtG teeth on the Odyssey block.

However, before all that, I was having quite a good time tromping on my enemies with Dark Stalkers, Nagas, and Phantom Beasts. Master of Magic was the fantasy version of the Master of Orion space opera game produced by MicroProse. And it surpassed it’s sibling by leagues in the “enjoyable play” department.

Now, I was recently going through my old stack of CDs (culling the weak, as is my wont). I found the Master of Magic disk that was released in late 1995. (The one with all the patches and revisions already installed - yeah, the good one!)

To get this old DOS game working on my Xubuntu laptop, I had to do this little dance:

1. sudo apt-get install dosbox
2. add a launcher to your panel with a command-line like this:
3. dosbox /where/you/installed/it/MAGIC.EXE -exit
4. click the icon you just created and play!

Inside dosbox, you’ve got a few meta-controls for how the environment works:

• CTRL-F12 feeds the environment more CPU cycles.
• CTRL-F11 reclaims those CPU cycles.
• CTRL-F5 will take a screenshot (in PNG format).
• CTRL-F10 releases the mouse from the dosbox environment.
• Want to play again? Click your mouse into the window again.

Now, for me, this is the end of the road. However, this procedure should get any of those old-school, hardcore, DOS-only programs working on your Xubuntu box.Yeah. Cool, isn’t it?

Now, I’ve got to put down an Orc rebellion in Bargaash. Peace is for the conquered!

Tags: Gaming, Technical //