Multi-CD games

[jafa]

The STC model to date has been to install the executable and normal install files to the hard drive, then use the user-supplied CDs.

A number of people have asked about installing the entire game to the hard drive or providing a way for the user to generate a single DVD version of the game.

It isn't too hard to get a game to find files in alternative locations... the hard part is the user experience of the initial install.

Looking for ideas on how to do the installer UI such as to allow the user to install multiple CDs to the hard drive and/or burn a DVD for playing the game from a single disc.

Nick

[Collector]

Hi, jafa

I have created a DOSBox installer for Gabriel Knight 2. It takes advantage of Hendroz's UniSCI tool to concatenate the resources. It asks for each disc sequentially as it installs the game completely to the harddrive and automatically runs Hendroz's utility. It also installs a small program that I wrote with NSIS that prepares the folder for burning to DVD with a new installer, a simple DOSBox configuration utility and an autorun that mimics the original GK2 autorun. All the user needs to do is to install the game from the original CDs with the new installer, run the DVD prep wizard and burn the contents of the installed folder to DVD.

[kingliam]

This is probably an amateur or non-traditional way of doing this, but I think this would probably be the easiest/most simple/less time consuming:

Create a simple batch file to prompt and copy both CD's to a user-chosen directory. After copying both CD's to a folder, the batch file could replace the current executable with the edited one (to not look for the CDs or chunked files across the multiple CDs). Then the batch file could prompt the user whether or not they wanted to run the game off of their computer, or off of 1 DVD. If they chose the DVD, the batch file would exit, otherwise it would then mount the folder (with the contents of both CD) to a drive (e.g. drive y:). Last the batch file could edit whichever resource file that points to the cd drive (e.g. resource.win for lighthouse) and repoint it to the mounted folder, where the game would run out of (e.g. point to y:).

If the user chose to not play off of the computer, the user could then be instructed to copy all of the contents (of the folder where both CD's were copied) to a DVD.

This is probably confusing, but is just an idea--as it would be very simple to implement, once the executable was edited.

[Collector]

With the SCI games it's not the executable that needs to be altered. They have no CD check. It just looks for the config file, which points the game to the resource maps to show it where everything is. When you concatenate the resources, the resource maps have to be changed to reflect this.