I’ve just started playing Gateway II-Homeworld. I downloaded it as abandonware and just dropped it in DOSBox, as is recommended by DOSBox itself.
The first hiccup was that part of the intro wouldn’t play. No biggie, I just pressed the spacebar and got on with the game.
Now I discovered that I cannot save my progress.
Here’s the error-message and some tech-speak from the site I downloaded from:
For the start-up hiccup: [Unable to open file ‘C:\gateway2\RESTART.DAT’]
For the save-error: [Unable to open file ‘C:\gateway2\HOME_001.SAV’]
On the website, under the heading “how to run the game”, is this text:
“The game works in WinXP, albeit without sound. It works well in either DOSBox or VDMSound, so either of those is recommended. The game should be run from C:Gateway2 (if you don’t like that you can change it in the Legend.ini file).”
Surely this must have something to do with the problem, but my literary-minded brain can’t understand it. Some babysteps-assistance with what would be a trivial problem for many of you would be much appreciated.
(I thought about just playing the entire game in one sitting, but you can die in Gateway 2, and beginning from scratch every time that happens would be just a bit too frustrating).
Can’t help with the details here, but I played Gateway 2 last year using the configuration Jimmy Maher set up, which you can find and download here, at the bottom of the post – I didn’t run into any issues with saving or cinematics not playing, so hopefully the same would be true for you!
I tip my hat to you, kind sir. You have solved my problem and eased my despair and inner turmoil. I don’t know what I would have done if I had not been able to play this sequel to one of the greatest IFs I have ever played.
I got to the part where you autolaunch the rocket after thwarting the bad guys (–>not a spoiler; you get this info about three turns in) before I noticed my SAVE was faulty. You can imagine the distress I was in. (That reminds me. Distress. Another game that’s waiting on my list.)
Late to the party here, but I’m horribly puzzled as well by how fiddly this game has gotten. I downloaded Jimmy Maher’s setup a couple months ago after I was unable to get my original CD version working, as it would run but wouldn’t show any game text, inexplicably. Anyway, I was playing the game fine for a while, so originally it worked. Then I took a break for a few weeks. When I tried to continue, suddenly the game wouldn’t play the intro sequence and also told me I didn’t have any saved games, despite the fact that the save files were in the game folder like they always were. After a lot of head-scratching, I finally figured out that the game suddenly decided to use my main games folder for saves rather than its own subfolder. I have no idea why this changed or how to change it back. I suspect the fact that it won’t play the intro is also because it’s looking for the information to run it in the wrong folder as well. I didn’t replay far enough to see whether other cutscenes would also fail to work.
I tried moving files around, putting the game in a different subfolder, recopying it from the original zip I downloaded, and nothing has worked. I even tried modifying the legend.ini file to change all the directory links from C:\ to C:\GW2, with the assumption that since DOSBox was mounting my games directory as C:\, maybe changing that link would change where the game was looking for things, but that did nothing as well.
Does anyone have any idea how to force the game to look in its own directory for the files it needs??
Edit: I finally got it to work properly by adding a backslash to the folder (C:\GW2\) after noticing saves were being saved as GW2HOME_sav instead of HOME_001.sav. I still don’t know why anything changed or why I had to do that, but at least it’s working properly again.