Galactic Civilizations for OS/2 (under Virtual PC)

Long before they got into the Windows scene, Stardock (creators of WindowBlinds and many other cool tools: https://www.stardock.com/) was actually one of the few commercial game development companies developing on top of OS/2.

Galactic Civilizations for OS/2 was their best known release - and while it was a bit rough around the edges from a user interface perspective - the game AI and playability absolutely rocked. The game was aimed to try and take the concepts from the original 'Civilization' and extend them to a galactic space faring environment.

This game runs well under Virtual PC - but if you want the midi based music to work you will need to install and configure TiMidity+ under OS/2 (which is no mean feat):

When this game was originally released - I was only able to find one software distributor in Australia that carried it and they were in another state - however I still managed to get a copy. Also of interest is that Stardock has just recently released a new updated version of Galactic Civilizations (this time for Windows) which also runs well inside of Virtual PC.

Cheers,
Ben

• Anonymous
  May 25, 2005
  cool!
• Anonymous
  May 25, 2005
  You get paid to play classic arcade games?
  What a cool job! ;-)
  
  PS: out of interest, any idea what is the most popular non-Microsoft operating system people are using under Virtual PC? Some kind of Linux distro (Redhat/Debian?)
• Anonymous
  May 26, 2005
  Ben,
  Since you mentioned Window Blinds specifically, do you suppose a fix for VPC is order? When I run Windows blinds on the VM windows, I get scroll bars and since you can't resize the window unless a supported OS is running with Additions installed, there's no way to get rid of the scroll bars without excluding VPC from WindowBlinds.
  I can't find the info in the Stardock FAQ for this now, of course, but it the issue comes from the program (VPC) defining the size of the window (IIRC), or not using the Windows API to define the window's size.
• Anonymous
  May 30, 2005
  Jonathan,
  
  Unfortunately I do not get paid to play games - this is just my side hobby. As for the most popular non-Microsoft OS - it would either be Fedora / RedHat or OS/2 (we have a lot of enterprise customers who run OS/2 inside of Virtual PC).
  
  SteveJ,
  
  Heh - I didn't know there was a problem there (I haven't used WindowBlinds in a while). I was just checking it out - and interestingly enough the problem only seems to show up on some skins. I will see what we can do.
  
  Cheers,
  Ben