Download Battleground 8: Prelude to Waterloo

Battleground 9: Chickamauga 2023-10-24 0 point

Unfortunately, there is no repack for final title of Battleground series, "Battleground 9: Chickamauga".

If you really want to play this title, please pay 30 bucks at Matrix Games who sells John Tiller's battleground series bundle: https://www.matrixgames.com/game/john-tillers-battleground-civil-war

CLB1966 2023-09-16 1 point

Nico, and anyone else having issues installing this:

Installing early WINDOWS games, like this, is more challenging than installing DOS games. Not difficult, per-se, but more complicated.

The trick is that the program won't run in DOS, and also won't run in MODERN "Windows." It runs in EARLY windows... whether "Windows 3.x" or perhaps "Windows 95/98." Given that this game was released in 1997, and is listed as a "windows" game, it's safe to say that it would run in WIndows 3.x and Windows 9x.

If you look closely at the files available here, you'll notice that the latest posted patch makes the game able to run in 32-bit. Note that DOS was 8-bit, and modern Windows has no ability to run 8-bit programs (which is what DOSBox helps out with). Early Windows extended this to be able to run 16-bit programs, as well as 8-bit programs. And then took on the ability to run 32-bit programs, which the vast majority of games until pretty recently were programmed as.

When Microsoft put out their 64-bit operating system versions, they intentionally REMOVED compatibility with both 8-bit and 16-bit programs. That's why DOSBox was invented... it's a "virtual machine" which natively runs 8-bit programs, just like DOS did. Interestingly, it can also have Windows 3.11 for Workgroups installed, or any earlier version, as a "DOS program" and it'll then gain 16-bit capability.

So, the trick to installing this, or most early "Windows 3.x" programs, is to install DOSBox, and create a DOSBox "virtual environment" (a fake DOSBox "drive" which is really a folder on your real machine) and install Windows 3.x into that environment. THen, y ou can install the WIndows 3.x-compatible program into that same "virtual environment." As far as the program is concerned, it's installed in that early version of Windows.

You can then, in this case, copy out the installation folder for the program and install the "32-bit patch" in your real computer's environment, and as Windows, today, retains the ability to run 32-bit programs (as well as its native 64-bit programs), you should be able to run the patched version in your native environment.

But you simply cannot run 8-bit or 16-bit software in 64-bit Windows. Microsoft made a conscious decision (which you can agree with, or not) to remove that capability from modern Windows.

That's the main driving force behind a range of 3rd-party "virtual machines" (like DOSBox). To re-introduce the capabilities Microsoft intentionally took away from us.

Now, if Microsoft were really a customer-focused business, they'd have either retained native support for lower-level code (8-bit or 16-bit) in later-revision Windows software. They could have done so natively, with almost no issues at all. Or, alternatively, they could have created their own "virtual environments" for 8-bit and 16-bit code (like DOSBox, or Oracle's VirtualBox VM, or any of a number of other virtualization options out there at present, allow) as a provided "utility" within their later releases of Windows.

They have provided Virtual machines, previously, granted... but only for the prior revisions, and at the same bit depth the operating system natively supports. And they no longer provide even those. When Windows 7 came out, they provided a downloadable virtual machine which provided "XP Mode" to allow users to run Windows XP programs (with severe limitations) on that Windows 7 machine, for example.

So... the only way to install this on a modern-operating-system machine is to do so from within a "virtual machine." The approach I mentioned, above... installing "Windows 3.11" within DOSBox... works well for me in most cases. Occasionally, I'll need to isntall "Windows 95" or "Windows 98" into a virtual machine to accomplish this... in which case, I use Oracle's VirtualBoxVM.

This solution of course requires owning a copy of the operating system you want to install into that virtual machine. Or at least having access to one. And either the CD code, or the ability to "virtually register/activate" in some cases. This is far, far more complicated, and I can't get into it here, but there ARE solutions to these issues. If you're going for Windows 3.x, or Windows 9x, it's easy. For later versions of Windows... XP and onwards... it gets increasingly more complex as version numbers increase. But it's still doable in all cases.

Nico 2022-01-17 2 points

Hi, I'm having trouble installing this. I've tried using launch box but truly, I don't really know what I'm doing. Any help is welcome thanks!