Legend Entertainment's old adventures on a PPC

Another reason to get a VGA device – running Legend Entertainment's old adventures reviewed

PC oldtimers must have heard of Legend Entertainment (on them, see for example http://www.the-underdogs.org/company.php?name=Legend+Entertainment ). They were the first to bring real, hi-res adventures to the PC. While, in 1990, Sierra was still releasing (at most) EGA low-res games (King's Quest IV, Space Quest III), Legend Entertainment came into the scene with Spellcasting 101 with wonderful, groundbreaking hi-res EGA graphics. Actually, that was the second PC game I could show my Amiga-owner friends (after Indy 500, which had a pretty lousy Amiga port – even my 12 MHz NEC V20+CGA combo was able to run it faster than a friend's Amiga 500) without making them laugh :)

No wonder I fell in love with Legend Entertainment's games. (Of course, I had played before a lot with Magnetic Scrolls/Infocom games on my Commodore devices – Fish! and the other big titles –, so the genre wasn't unknown to me and liked it much.) I've played all of them through, laughed my @ss off and just loved the games.

I've always hoped my PDA's were able to run their games. Up to now, because of the lack of hi-res (VGA) screens, sufficiently advanced emulators and fast CPU's, this seemed impossible. Fortunately, now that there're VGA devices on the market, these old games can be played again.

You'll need Pocket DOS (http://www.pocketdos.com ) to play the games. You'll only be able to play games released before the 386/486 age; that is, games released before Death Gate. Later games like Mission Critical, Shannara, Callahan's Crosstime Saloon etc are 386/486 only; therefore, they don't run.

The emulation speed on my VGA Pocket Loox 720 is pretty good – as on a 8-10 MHz 286 AT.

A generic note: delete all .RS (RealSound) files before running these games because they'll crash Pocket DOS! They're digitized sound. You won't need .MUS files either because Pocket DOS doesn't support MIDI music.

The games with their first engine:

Spellcasting 101 (http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?id=1027 ): only runs in CGA mode; in EGA, it crashes.

Time Quest (http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?id=1161 ): has problems with mouse. This means, no matter what magnification you use, your screen taps will always be registered in an upper position than they really are. Mouse sensitivity setting, orientation changing won't help. Switching to CGA mode / deleting EGA pic files won't help because they app will strictly want to start in EGA mode. Spellcasting 201 also suffers from this problem. These two games are to be played with an external keyboard (and maybe mouse – don't know, I haven't tested the later).

Eric the Unready (http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?id=375 ): works great. So does Gateway Corporation and Gateway 2 too. The latter, incidentally, requires legend.ini, which must be downloaded separately and edited to refer to the current location of your files.

These two games are VGA, so, run in 640*480. This is advantageous, therefore, to hide the on-screen keyboard if you play with mouse / an external keyboard.

The two games, Companions of Xanth and Superhero League of Hoboken, utilizing their second, more of a point-and-click engine also run OK. They're low-res VGA (MCGA), so they won't look really cool on a VGA device. On a QVGA PPC, however, they're great.

All in all, there're 3 high-res and 2 low-res games that run flawlessly. Even this is a big plus because, for example, Eric the Unready is a very-very good game. Their first title, S101, however, needs to be run in CGA mode and the next two titles, S201 and TQ, also have problems. Still, they can be played too. So, you'll surely have a lot of fun :)