Alpha Centauri
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Alpha Centauri
1–10 of 78 posts
Re: Alpha Centauri
#2If gog ever manages to get the rights to rerelease civ II, I'd gladly pay $80 for a copy I could just click and run on windows and linux. Yes, there are copies on abandonware sites, but the sound is almost always jank, the soundtrack is gone and the advisors don't work (they really added a lot of character to the game!). The nostalgia of childhood is broken. I've tried everything, up to and including running win 3.1 with sound blaster drivers on dosbox to no avail. This is my white whale
Re: Alpha Centauri
#3SMAC was a really great game, ahead of its time in many ways and laid some groundwork for ideas later worked into Civs 3+.
It's a shame the totally-not-a-SMAC-sequel Civ: Beyond Earth did not not do it justice.
Re: Alpha Centauri
#4If gog ever manages to get the rights to rerelease civ II, I'd gladly pay $80 for a copy I could just click and run on windows and linux. Yes, there are copies on abandonware sites, but the sound is almost always jank, the soundtrack is gone and the advisors don't work (they really added a lot of character to the game!). The nostalgia of childhood is broken. I've tried everything, up to and including running win 3.1…
Is this an emulation problem or are the online copies corrupted? You can buy an original copy of the game on eBay and run it in Dosbox-X or Dosbox-staging, both well ahead vanilla Dosbox in features.
Also, I bet the Internet archive or exoDOS will have a perfect copy. The latter is a one click experience. Check the laws in your country for whether these are legal.
Re: Alpha Centauri
#5> Alas, today Alpha Centuari feels far more believable than Civilization and its sang-froid about the inevitability of perpetual progress. These days, Alpha Centauri’s depiction of bickering, bitterly entrenched factions warring over the very nature of truth, progressing not at all spiritually or morally even as their technology runs wild in a hundred different perilous directions, strikes many as the more accurate picture of the nature of our species. People play Alpha Centauri to engage with modern life; they play Civilization to escape from it.
wow. ive never understood why AC worked while Civ5/6 fell off the map for me, but i think this was it.
Re: Alpha Centauri
#6so like, i know there are some civ clones out there... has anyone tried to make an OpenAlphaCentauri? i'd love to hack on this but i dont have the time or gamedev experience to take it 0 to 1....
Re: Alpha Centauri
#7If gog ever manages to get the rights to rerelease civ II, I'd gladly pay $80 for a copy I could just click and run on windows and linux. Yes, there are copies on abandonware sites, but the sound is almost always jank, the soundtrack is gone and the advisors don't work (they really added a lot of character to the game!). The nostalgia of childhood is broken. I've tried everything, up to and including running win 3.1…
There's a number of active communities about still playing the game, including /r/alphacentauri on reddit, a discord server at https://discord.gg/7BkcvXUX , and https://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?action=community
I know the last time I picked it up, there were a well respected set of patches from scient (a quick google pointed me to https://github.com/DrazharLn/scient-unofficial-smacx-patch ). Somewhere in here is a pre-done distribution you can just click and run with for modern windows.
Re: Alpha Centauri
#8I recall a C64 game(or Amiga, but I'm fairly sure C64) where you settled the solar system. The Moon, Mars, Venus, Titan, etc.
You even had to genetically engineer your colonists, so they could withstand the environments. Fun game, but I can't find it via Google.
If anyone knows this game, please share. I'd love to play it again.
Re: Alpha Centauri
#9I recall a C64 game(or Amiga, but I'm fairly sure C64) where you settled the solar system. The Moon, Mars, Venus, Titan, etc. You even had to genetically engineer your colonists, so they could withstand the environments. Fun game, but I can't find it via Google. If anyone knows this game, please share. I'd love to play it again.
teaching you to fish: https://chatgpt.com/share/6855db77-b474-8012-863e-8cf8d6e415...
Re: Alpha Centauri
#10What really set Alpha Centauri apart for me was the fictional history and how it is presented. Civilization's tech tree is a form of human history, accompanied by famous quotes contextualizing the importance of the discoveries.
Alpha Centauri presents its tech to you the same way, but it's inventions are science fiction, and likewise the quotes [1] are fictional, from the important characters, the major players of the various factions within. You get a real sense for the groups involved and the major players from such. You get a sense of the civilizations involved, sometimes presented in their folklore or humor. For example, the militaristic Spartans quote a variation of an old marching cadence - "I don't know but I've been told / Deirdre's got a Network Node / Likes to press the on-off switch / Dig that crazy Gaian witch!"
My favorite, though, and feeling ever more prescient:
"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
Commissioner Pravin Lal U.N. Declaration of Rights"
[1] A good compendium of them - https://www.generationterrorists.com/quotes/smac.html