Tag Archives: MS-DOS

Theme Hospital

A hospital simulation game from The makers of Theme Park. Whilst its not an accurate simulator like Sim Healthcare, its still a lot of fun and has a lot of Bullfrog-type humor.

You start off with a blank empty hospital building, First thing to pop down is the reception desk, which is where patents will flock to when they first enter your hospital, of which they are then referred to the GP’s Office. Here you will want to build further diagnosis and treatment rooms as the patents demand for them.

GP’s Office: Used to find out what’s wrong with the patent. Usually a doctor in the GP’s office will be able to diagnose the patents depending on their skill set, but some will require the patient to refer to another diagnosis room to find out what type of illness the patient has. This room gets very busy as patients will return to this room until they are diagnosed, but not when they are cured. A good tactic is to build one near the diagnosis rooms like the X-ray or Scanner to help deduce the load. If you have a consultant doctor, you will want to place them in the GP’s Office as they are better at diagnosing illness than a regular or junior doctor.

Ward: Used for both diagnosis and treatment, this is managed by a Nurse. Wards can be sized quite large, and more than one bed can be placed. Patents will also rest here before entering the Operating Theatre. Beds can only be placed at a specific angle, so don’t make the room too big otherwise its wasted space.

Pharmacy: Used to administer a wide range of drugs used to cure patients. Operated by a nurse, you will need to build multiple Pharmacy’s later on in the game since this will cure a majority of illness.

Psychiatric: Like the ward this is also used for diagnosis and treatment. Requires a doctor with the Psychiatrist qualification. Bookcases and a skeleton can be added, not sure if this has any affect on the diagnosis?

Further diagnosis rooms consist of the Cardiogram, Scanner, X-Ray and Ultrascan, these are unlocked after research and require regular maintenance by an handyman. These machines get better through further research and can withstand multiple usage cycles and earthquakes. Since these rooms are only used to cure a single illness, you probably only need one per hospital, but in the case of emergency’s where up to 14 patients can arrive at the same time with the same illness, you may need to build another to satisfy demand.

Clinics are also treatment rooms that use machines to cure patients, again these are also unlocked as you progress through the game, the the inflation clinic being unlocked from the start. Slack Tongue Clinic and Fracture Clinic are two examples that are used to treat specific illness.

The Facilities are rooms that help your hospital to function and are required to progress to the next level: Toilets are used to stop patents from making a mess in your hospital, of which multiple toilets will need to be placed in larger hospitals. Usually one toilet per building is needed. A staff room allows staff to relax and replenish their energy with further objects being able to be researched like an arcade video game that reduced the time needed for staff to stay in the staff room. The Research Dept, unlocked from level 3 onwards allows your hospital to unlock new illnesses, rooms and machines, along with improving the effectiveness of your drugs which helps prevent accidental death by your staff. There is also an autopsy function that requires a sacrifice of a patient that will boost research for that illness, but carry’s a risk of a reputation drop if this is discovered.

Lastly there is a training room that allows doctors to learn new qualifications by a consultant level doctor. A problem here is doctors in training can also become consultants, which prevent them from learning new skills. This can be annoying when you are in the middle of training a new surgeon, only for him to become a consultant which stops skill progression.

Micromanagement

As you run your hospital, there are several elements that you need to manage

Staff Happiness: How happy are your staff, placing them in larger rooms with plants and heating will make them happier, otherwise they may demand a salary increase

Heating: Radiators need to be installed and set to an acceptable level, cold hospitals can affect the reputation and happiness of staff

Upkeep: Patients will litter the hospital as they remain in your hospital, ensure you have Handymen to clean up after them. Plants also require watering by handymen. Lastly, rats can infest the hospital and can be shot by quickly placing your mouse cursor over a moving rat.

Emergency’s: These start to appear from level 3 onwards, you must cure the specified amount of patients within the time limited to earn the bonus.

Research: as you build the first Research Department, you can monitor and focus on different aspects of research, if you prefer to have a focus on drug effectiveness or for diagnosis machines

Epidemics: These start to occur past level 6 and require you to treat all patients with the specified illness before the health minister arrives at your hospital.

Earthquakes: These can actually happen which results in the screen shaking rapidly, patients may fall to the ground but I don’t believe they die. The main issue is the damage to the machines, make sure they have been repaired by the handyman and they have adequate strength or the machines will be destroyed, rendering the room to be useless. I recommend replacing machines that have less than 5 units of strength.

Network Play

This requires a patch to be installed which adds network play support to the game which can then be accessed by choosing the middle part of the skull in the menu. The game is reliant on IPX or serial protocols to communicate with another player. For Windows 95/98 you need to ensure the IPX protocol stack is installed and enabled, which isn’t done by default. You can install it by clicking on the ‘Add’ button and selecting the Protocol, then IPX Comparable Protocol from the Microsoft group. You will have to reboot your system and might need the Windows 9x install CD to finish install.

I was able to get this working over 86Box using a PCap configured network using two 86BOX VMs, setting the VMWare network adaptors seemed to work the best. Both players have access to the same map and must complete with each other for land, when purchasing land a bidding war is started between all players on the map. Objectives are given every six months which determines who wins the game, the game continues until one player loses.

Original PC MS-DOS/Win32

A hybrid DOS/Windows 32bit game which can run under either environment. Whilst designed for Windows 95 it will happily work under Windows 98 and ME.

A patch was released for the game which fixes a few bugs, adds a difficultly level adjusted and support for IPX network play.

The game is also capable of running under DOS, which might be useful for low end PCs since its not reliant on Windows 95 running in the background.

No Macintosh version was release for this game, which is odd for a simulation game released in this era.

CorsixTH

This is a remake of the original game using a custom engine designed for more modern Windows operating systems, and has been ported to Linux based operating systems. Highly recommend as this allows the game to un in higher resolutions (tested up to 2560×1440) and fixes a lot of bugs that plagued the original game.

Sony PlayStation

The game was ported to the Sony PlayStation shortly after the PC release. Running in a lower resolution and missing the background music which removes a lot of charm to the game. Its also a bitch to play since the game has poorly adapted the user interface from the PC version. You have to use the controller to navigate the cursor onscreen to select the dialog boxes, instead of just mapping them to the PlayStation face buttons which makes it time consuming to perform simple actions.

Rooms are also fixed in size, which does make it easier to play via the controller.

This was also related as a PSone classic for the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable.

Theme Hospital (Multiplayer maps in CorsixTH)

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Note: This isn’t a guide on playing multiplayer games in CorsixTH, more like loading the maps in single player

Theme Hospital shipped with a few multiplayer maps that were intended to be used with network play, which were not intended to be played in single player. With the original PC release, there is a way to force the game to play them, after a while this can cause the game to crash since the game does not know how handle the maps in single player mode. Also there are two bonus maps which were used for the bonus rat levels, that are also discussed here.

A very busy first level, with all rooms available

In CorsixTH and the use of the map editor, we are able to import these maps and convert them pack to single player use, for which we can play then in single scenario.

2 Player Maps: large sized hospitals intended for two players, in the range of Level 20-24

3 Player Maps: larger sized hospitals for 3 players, uses level range 30-34

4 Player Maps: huge sized maps intended for 4 players, level range 40-44. Unfortunately I could not get the game to load these maps due to a lua script. Seems CorsixTH does not recognise 4 players (or maybe the original came counted from 0 and CorsixTH counts from 1?)

Bonus Maps: two maps are bonus maps that were used for the rat killing levels, these are Level 13 and level 14. They are rather small but functional as a basic hospital, Although the second one has a few graphical errors, like a misplaced water tile.

Level 13: Looks similar to level 1 at the front of the hospital, possible this was an early design of it that was later reused. Has a rear door with a path that leads no nowhere and has no mapping data so it wont be used by patents
Level 14: Another that has the same entrance path design to level one, this hospital is highly symmetrical.

Along with the maps came with was the SAM files, which contains level variable data such as the type diseases, rooms available, emergency and pandemic probability. The bonus levels do not have these as they were not intended to be used as a regular hospital.

Converting the maps for CorsixTH

To do this the legacy map editor was used from the 2014 release (Version 0.4.0) where the map was opened, and then saved which converted the map to the new format. The original game did not use a specific extension, with files being named as Level.L01, LEVEL.L31, etc. CorsixTH uses the .map extension.

Whilst the 4 player maps will open in the map editor for this version and can be saved, trying to open it on the latest build results in an error.

The levels seem to have their own names, CRUDSVILLE, NICEVILLE, Emergency!, RUMBLETOWN and ST. SCAVENGERS. I don’t know if these names ever appeared in game, the only reference to them are in the SAM files for each level.

The newer CorsixTH builds don’t recognise the maps files from the original game unless you amend the file extension to .map however i still cannot get the game to load the 4 player maps this way.

Download

Download (Box)

Extract into the Levels directory in the CorsixTH folder, maps can be played using the single scenario menu option

WipEout

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A futuristic racing game released in 1995 for various platforms.

In Wipeout your mostly battling against the track itself, rather than the rival ships, and at fast speeds the game can become a challenge, requiring quick reflexes. Thankfully it comes with a banging soundtrack, something which is a staple of the Wipeout series of games.

2 Player mode exists for the console versions, but its one of those games that needs a serial cable, two PlayStation or two Saturn’s, TV’s and copies of each game.

PlayStation

Probably the best version, since it has all the graphical effects, and the sound effects when you enter a tunnel. Can also be played on the PlayStation 3 and PSP as part of the PS Classics. Only issue with this port is the low resolution and the pop-in textures on the track, poor draw distance. As a bonus the game supports the use of a NeGcon controller, allowing for an analogue control, useful for turning and for the airbreaks.

On modern emulators you can sort of re-create the PC effects such as higher resolution and texture filtering, but you are still stuck at 30fps. Overclocking the CPU results in the game running too fast.

Duckstation: Enhanced

The game clears up rather well compared to how it originally looked

Sega Saturn

Wipeout was released for the promising Sega Saturn, and serves as an example of the PSY-Q dev kit for the Saturn, which Psygnosis were trying to promote at the time as an alternative to Sega’s devkit (a version of PSY-Q was released for the PlayStation). The soundtrack has been altered with some songs being removed

Screenshots: SSF emulator

Windows

WipEout was ported to the PC a year later than the PlayStation release, and was designed exclusively for ATI video cards and was typically bundled with Windows PC that had those cards. It’s one of the games that supports ATI’s CIF API rather than Direct3D. This limits it to ATI Rage series 3D chipsets, the one in my Dell OptiPlex being one of them, but in order to play CIF games you need to use an older 1999 driver from ATI (The Windows 98 bundled driver has no CIF support), also CIF is only supported under Windows 98, there is no support for Windows NT 4.0. ATI later removed CIF support from its drivers from late 1999 onwards, so you may have to downgrade the driver order to play. A CIF wrapper exists for Windows 7 onwards, although I’ve not tested it.

Screenshots below are captured from a Dell OptiPlex GX1 with an Intel Pentium 2 350mhz and an ATI RAGE 2 with 4Mb of VRAM

The main difference is the ability to play the game in a higher resolution and with the ability to play at a higher framerate, it’s not exactly 60fps on a Rage2 but its a lot more smoother than the PlayStation version. However the sound is not has good as the console versions, with the PC missing the echo sound effects that play when you enter a tunnel. It’s also one of those games that’s stores the music as Redbook CD audio, and the game plays the audio back like a regular CD player would. This gives the option to change the CD (as the game runs from the hard disk) to play your own music.

MS-DOS

Very similar to the accelerated Windows version, but has a lot of enhancements removed, there’s no texture filtering, the framerate is lower and the resolution is reduced, likely because everything is being done on the CPU. You are limited to a low 320 resolution, 16 bit colour.

Personally I would stick with the PlayStation version, or the Saturn if you prefer more detailed textures. The PC versions sacrifice too much for what benefit they give, although you get the opportunity to run in a higher resolution, the missing sound effects are a huge setback and ruin the immersion of the game. besides with modern emulators you can run the game with additional filtering and upscaling, the FPS is still stuck at 30fps.

Hackers

A concept imaging of Wipeout appeared in the movie Hackers, which features slightly different gameplay with obstacles on the track, a crew that speaks to you instead of techno music playing. It was believed to be rendered on a SGI workstation and features perspective correct texture mapping

External Links

WipEout – Archive Website

WipEout – DOS Support

Windows For Workgroups 3.11 Beta (Build 70)

Install

MS-DOS (6.0) must be installed first before Windows 3.11 can be installed. At this point Windows was still reliant on MS-DOS, but were regarded as two separate products.

After install and some graphics drivers. By default Windows will use VGA mode which restricts you to 640×480 and 16 colours. Windows Sound System is not included in this build but can be installed and was required to use the Windows Sound System Soundcard.

Applications

Microsoft Anti-Virus: They had their own Anti-Virus application, before Windows security essentials, Defender or Windows Live OneCare. Different drivers can be scanned manually on request.
Smartdrive: Disk caching application
Undelete: As the concept of the recycle bin did not exist until Windows 95, Microsoft Undelete was offered instead which could restore files deleted by the user that had not been overwritten

Accessories

Write: Predecessor to Wordpad, for when you don’t have Microsoft Office installed
Paintbrush: Paint
Notepad: Text editing application
Recorder: Used to record keyboard and mouse commands, useful for automation.
Calculator: On screen calculator
Clock: Displays the time in both analogue (Face) and digital format
Character Map: Insert and remap any characters that are not supported by the users keyboard
Media Player: Plays WAV and MIDI sound files supported by the users soundcard
Sound Recorder: Records sound from the line input to a WAV file

Control Panel

Control Panel remains unchanged from Windows For Workgroups 3.1

Drivers

Some drivers that may be useful to users of PCem, depending on the machines they are emulating

AVGA2 Driver

The Commodore PC I was using used a Acumos graphics accelerator onboard and integrated to its motherboard, which was based on a Cirrus Logic CL-GD5402. Installing a driver lets you access further resolutions and colour modes that the graphics chip supports.

AVGA2 Driver – Vetusware