Mean Streets under Virtual PC

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Heh.  It has been so long since I posted about a game that I am sure that many of you were wondering what had gone wrong.  Well, never fear, things have just been a bit busy around here.  So, today I was reminiscing about about old Tex Murphy games - and thought I would dust off some of my games to see how they went under Virtual PC.

Mean Streets is the first Tex Murphy game - and it has an intriguing plot where you play the role of Tex Murphy, a private investigator in a post-apocalyptic world.  You start off investigating the death of a professor who was working on a secret project.

The oddity of this game was that it constantly switched between traditional 'talky' style - where you had to interrogate people and choose the right conversation options - and a 3D flying hovercar mode which you use to travel between each location.  Both of these aspects were quite top notch for the time the game was created in - but I was always annoyed by having to deal with these two opposites of game play jammed together.

So how does it run under Virtual PC?  OK -

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There are two notable issues when running the game under Virtual PC:

  1. When controlling the hovercar, the arrow keys are a bit too sensitive.  This is annoying - but tolerable.
  2. Mean Streets used a state of the art sound engine where it tried to play digital sounds over the humble PC speaker.  While this was amazing in the day - Virtual PC is unable to emulate this correctly - and the result is a torturous cacophony coming out of your speakers.  Unfortunately I could never get the game to stop making this sound - and ended up resorting to muting my sound under Windows in order to play the game.

Cheers,
Ben