On its IFDB-page, there’s a Windows Application (2112.exe) that gives an error message when I run it. Something about missing supporting files.
Beneath the exe-file, there’s a list of dozens of sound-files (wav). There’s also a file called “Richtx32.ocx”, which is apparently the library the game uses.
I suspect I can do without the sound files (?), but a game definitely needs a library. When I tried downloading that library-file however, my computer refused, stating this kind of file may damage my machine.
Anyone more technically inclined than poor ol’ me who can explain/give pointers?
FYI, for Win95, DosBox is not the best solution - or even a really workable one in all but the most basic cases. The authors of DosBox do not ever intend to make Windows a supported thing, and the fact any Windows applications work on it at all is mostly just luck.
DosBox-X is a fork that supports Windows games way better.
.ocx files are really just a form of .dll files, containing executable code that implement the old Windows ActiveX control interface. Back in the day they were commonly used by Visual Basic, and that’s what the IFDB page suggests it’s written in, which makes sense. Without more details it’s hard to know whether it was your browser, your anti-virus or how WIndows is configured that made your PC refuse to download it. It’s probably okay, or at least, no worse than downloading any other sort of executable code from the Internet. As ever, you have to balance the risk against what you want to do.
As other people have mentioned with comments about DosBox and similar, a safer approach is to have some sort of VM environment with an old version of Windows running in it, and run any executable you’re not completely sure about within that: then when you’re done you can delete the VM and be pretty sure nothing bad is left on your PC. But that is more effort to set up.
It’s not enough for richtx32.ocx to be there, it has to be registered in the OS registry. If you open a command prompt, go to the directory containing those files, then run “regsvr32 richtx32.ocx” as a command, then that should fix it. You may need to have that command prompt running under an administrator account for that to work, depending on how your PC is set up.
I see. I have not used Windows in more than 10 years. I can only say it works on Linux with WINE (but game crashed if you double click on some of the words of the description ¬¬)
