Guides Warcraft Adventures : Lord of the Clans on Retroarch Dosbox-Pure

[_oBSOLEte_]

OK guys and gals. Today I will try to install Iceman's 3DFX drivers on my Retroarch Win98 box and see if I can get the best perf out of the hardware accelerated emulation.

But we're not here for that. See, I also read on AbandonwareFR's forum about a strange suggestion for a point and click to play next... Warhammer Warcraft Adventures : Lord of the Clans. I vaguely remember that cancelled late 90s game for Win9x, a Blizzard collab with Russian-american studio Animation Magic. The guys behind games like Hotel Mario, the CDi's Zelda games, and King's Quest VII. Personally I only played Kin's Quest VII.

Despite being in late alpha stage of dev and fully playable, Blizzard canceled the release because the suits were not happy with the level of quality. Yep. The same guys who green-lit Warcraft 2 Reforged. XD Let that sink in for a moment... Anyway the last build of the game was leaked in 2016 and became some gaming esoteric material for youtube poops while making Blizzard furious and throwing DMCA threats left and right.

Obviously I need to play this.

So I load the ZIP file with Retroarch/DOSBox-Pure, launch my little win98, and surprise surprise, it runs... But the intro sounds weird, so I google around a bit and find this restoration project for Warcraft Adventures cutscenes... And the guy did the awesome job of fixing all the cinematics for that cancelled game and worked on that project for eight years now, with its last patch released last year in v1.1. My mind is blown. Thanks DerSilver83. You're a legend.

Reading through the blog post... What I need to do next is to unzip the original archive, overwrite the cutscenes in the W4/Cut_Scenes folder and replace the video codec DLL next to the game executable.

So right now this whole game could run on WinXP, Win10/11 or Wine with compatibility mode (this I tested myself), but will it still run on my DOSBOX-Pure / Win98 box with some nice CRT shader from Retroarch? I recompress the whole thing with the patched videos under a new WarcraftAdventure.zip file. Then I "Load content" in Retroarch, with the DosBox-Pure core... Run the installed win98 OS...

As soon as Win98 boots, I set the gamepad to act as a mouse with the DosBox Pure settings. Default shortcut is L3, and R and L will switch the window to "Start Menu", the "virtual keyboard" or the "gamepad mapper".

In that old Win98 I go to "My computer" and the zip file is correctly showing, as "D:", what we ancient people would call the "CD-ROM drive". The whole ZIP file is mounted the same way ISO files were with old software like VirtuaCloneDrive and Alcohol120%, ready to be opened and executed.

Now let's see that Intro video... The sound is still a bit choppy for me, maybe the patched video are a bit harder on the CPU to decode... So I go to the core options in Retroarch, and in the "Performance" section I set the number of cycles emulated to the equivalent of a Pentium 2, 300 MHz. Now we're talking baby, the video is quite smooth.

OK so now I'm in game. Let's tweak a shader preset for CRT-Guest-Advanced-NTSC on that 640x480 base resolution. Something that will smooth out the pixel dithering the artists used with the limited color palette. And with thin light scanlines, a bit of color correction and dark pixels a bit more dark. I'm in 1080p right now so the image is not evenly upscaled, so there's a tiny little moire effect that I see when I'm close to the screen. But that disappears when setting the screen to 1440p (480x3 even upscale) or 4K.

Well I think it looks pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good. WTF would they cancel that game, some of the painted backgrounds are quite nice. It's not Curse of the Monkey Island but for Warcraft fans it's fine...

And there's a lot of fan service for people who enjoyed Warcraft 2 that was released just before this game. I know this guy! Say hello to my little friend!

OK let's wrap this up, save all the configs we tweaked and use the virtual keyboard to input a proper name for our first save.

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I guess the next step could be to transfer the zip file and my "Windows 98 Second Edition.img" from the system folder of retroarch on the smartphone and play the game like that. Blizzard would be happy for people to finally accept to play their games on mobile I guess. Dont you guys have phones?

Anyway, that's all for today! I'm gonna point and click for da horde now.

 

[Graw]

Huh. Cool. I remember seeing a trailer for this that came with StarCraft or Warcraft or something back in the day. I remember the trailer made it look pretty cool. It was all just CGI cutscenes if I remember right. I remember it made the game seem way more epic than a point and click.

 

[_oBSOLEte_]

Huh. Cool. I remember seeing a trailer for this that came with StarCraft or Warcraft or something back in the day. I remember the trailer made it look pretty cool. It was all just CGI cutscenes if I remember right. I remember it made the game seem way more epic than a point and click.

I just have a vague memory of some news articles in Joystick, a french magazine. But nope, the game videos are more like late 90s euro-jank cartoons and from what I played so far it's definately a classical point and click. But the art style is good, some of the backgrounds are well painted.

If you can find that trailer video I'd be curious.

I also vaguely remember a Starcraft Ghost game that would have been an action TPS thing. The Blizzard iceberg...

 

[Graw]

I just have a vague memory of some news articles in Joystick, a french magazine. But nope, the game videos are more like late 90s euro-jank cartoons and from what I played so far it's definately a classical point and click. But the art style is good, some of the backgrounds are well painted.

If you can find that trailer video I'd be curious.

I also vaguely remember a Starcraft Ghost game that would have been an action TPS thing. The Blizzard iceberg...

I can't find it so maybe i'm misremembering. But I would have been like 7 or 8 years old when I saw this so I could just be confusing previews of Warcraft 2 with Warcraft adventures. I just remember one of those early blizzard games came with a disc that had a bunch of trailers on it and one of those trailers was for Warcraft Adventures and child me wasn't even sure what kind of game it was but the trailers made it look cool and I wondered for a long time when it was coming out.

 

[_oBSOLEte_]

So the game isn't very long, I got a bit more than 4 hours of gameplay out of it. It's fully playable emulated like that. Reminded me of Full Throttle, with maybe the same level of production quality for animations and graphics in 640x480. The story is a bit goofy like Warcraft 2 was, with a bit of cartoon humor. The gameplay is point and click à la Full Throttle, with pretty standard riddles. I never got stuck, always had a goal to work towards and after exploring the scenes I could guess what to do next. Only had a graphic glitch once, and no bug nor crash. The ending is satisfying and it didn't overstayed its welcome. All in all I had a good time.

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Spoiler: Some early screenshots I found cool :

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There's maybe also a small tweak to add to the install, and that is to change where save files are located. By default the game will save in D: and that's not something I particularly like.

The reason is that DosboxPure will basically use 3 files.

• "Windows 98 Second Edition.img" in the Retroarch System folder. That file is basically your C: drive when you launch any game, any ISO or ZIP file AND you choose to "Run preinstalled OS Win98".
• "WarcraftAdventures.pure.zip" in the Retroarch Saves folder. Same filename than our game's ZIP file but with a ".pure" added in between. That file is where you'd usually get C: modifications if you were only using DOS. But in our case with Win98 games, this file seems to only contains DosBOX pure settings like the gamepad mappings.
• "WarcraftAdventures-$$$$$$$$.sav" also in the Retroarch Saves folder. IME each time you shut Win98 correctly and close the core, a .sav file like this will be created. This is all the modifications this session applied to the D: drive. So the next time you launch the game, D: will be the result of a mix between our game WarcraftAdventures.zip and the last .sav file containing the modifications (like some kind of incremental backup).

Why I dont like this setup? Because it seems that if it crashes or is not shut down properly, the third file is not created. Then all the modifications and all your saves for this session, are not saved. This is a very specific case to this game that the default path for saving is on D: anyway. We want the game to save in C:. To do that, in Win98 just open the book.ini file next to the game .exe and edit the line about "SaveDir=".

You can also use savestates and fastforward. By using savestates and the same config you could for example skip all the Win98 login and starting the game, and go directly at your last spot or in the title screen. Those savestates are independant of those three files and managed the same way as the other cores states in Retroarch.

 

[Pandaprewmaster325]

I honestly like the game sure thrall doesn't have his awesome metzen voice and at some point has a robotic voice but damn I love the artstyle a lot the death knight looks awesome , it was perhaps for the better the game got cancelled but it provided an interesting insight into how blizzard perceived the world of WarCraft pre WC3

 

[_oBSOLEte_]

I honestly like the game sure thrall doesn't have his awesome metzen voice and at some point has a robotic voice but damn I love the artstyle a lot the death knight looks awesome , it was perhaps for the better the game got cancelled but it provided an interesting insight into how blizzard perceived the world of WarCraft pre WC3

Yep I agree. The Death Knight and all that swamp area of the game got very well painted backgrounds with good art-style.

 

[Pandaprewmaster325]

Yep I agree. The Death Knight and all that swamp area of the game got very well painted backgrounds with good art-style.

Indeed its grim batol I think a zone that was firmly controlled by the horde you can spot a barracks in the background lots of nice details and the fact that you can enter a temple of the damned and see its insides was cool , WC2 death knights design is just a masterpiece

 

[_oBSOLEte_]

Indeed its grim batol I think a zone that was firmly controlled by the horde you can spot a barracks in the background lots of nice details and the fact that you can enter a temple of the damned and see its insides was cool , WC2 death knights design is just a masterpiece

Yep. Funny I had forgotten it was a unit in WC2 I've beaten that game so long ago, I think I never actually used them it was all about those Bloodlusted Mage-Ogres and Dragons. I will replay them!

 

[Pandaprewmaster325]

Yep. Funny I had forgotten it was a unit in WC2 I've beaten that game so long ago, I think I never actually used them it was all about those Bloodlusted Mage-Ogres and Dragons. I will replay them!

Death knights are very useful in the expansion , yes BL ogre magi are one of my biggest complaints about the game its removes any sort of challenge , btw they made a remaster