Last Dynasty

[Rakeesh]

Over than a year ago I was browsing my old PC gaming magazines and found a review on Last Dynasty. I didn't feel like reading the scenario etc but I fell in love with the screenshots. Generally I am in love with the 90s sci-fi games and all that campy mixture of fmv, photographs, 3d art and CGI. I love how those 90s people imagined space organizations, space battles etc

Lately, I got a copy of that game, unfortunately without package of manual; and guess what, XP doesn't support it. As of now, I have managed to run it in a vmware Win98 installation under linux, and yes, I can play some of it. It's a real pain because the game stutters (even with details off) and it insists not to listen to my joystick

What bothers me is the absence of subtitles (a bad habit of FMVs back then) which means I can't help but miss half of the action. As you can guess from my bad grammar, I am not a native English speaker. In dialogues, I can't make out half of the worlds and I fail to "visualize" the exotic names. Sometimes I can't make out if a mumble is an english word, or the name of some planet.

The other thing that bothers me is that the protagonist Mel looks very much alike his assistant Dok. They look like brothers, they are both tall, thin, same build, same facial features and same balding nondescript hair! Whenever a cutscene begins, I have trouble identify with "the protagonist" as I was supposed to. I just wait until someone mentions his name, or wait to see which of them will do something interesting, and then I determine it's Mel

Now, I noticed that this game has almost zero legacy and zero online presence. Even wikipedia has no article on it, while its Mobygames entry provides magazine reviews but none of them is authored by a gamer/user. There is no fan site dedicated to it anywhere and even on this forum... I happen to be the first guy who brings it on. No previous mention about it (Ooooh, a ghost game)

It seems to me like it was an ambitious production with actors, some CGI sceneries, nice interface, detailed help system and rich scenario. But the overall result was quite average. I am sure no gamer would love a game with poor options, long cutscenes and no key to bypass them

In any case, if anyone has tried this game, I'd love to hear his impressions and experiences. My exploration to its universe goes on, as long as vmware allows me

[Rakeesh]

only 18 views, and no comments? What a neglected game, really

[Collector]

What can I say? I especially like a number of the Coktel Vision games, Woodruff being my favorite, but The Last Dynasty is not one of them. I tried to like it and couldn't.

[Rakeesh]

That's fine, what did disappoint you most?

[Collector]

The style just didn't work for me.

[Terra-jin]

Hi there,

I've played The Last Dynasty when I was a kid, and it brought me to the space-sim genre. I enjoyed the atmosphere and the music and particularly the adventure part.

I'm currently trying to play it again on my Vista laptop. By playing it in 640x480 compatibility mode, the game starts up and looks normal, only it keeps asking for CD 1. The CD is old, but still readable when I open it in explorer. I'm guessing there's a compatibility issue with Dynasty's way of checking for the CD...

Is this problem familiar to you guys? Do other games have this issue as well? And most importantly, is there a solution?


Be great to hear from you!

Greetings,
Terra-jin

[Collector]

I would have to take a look at it, which I haven't done since I had Windows 98. I think DrMcCoy of ScummVM said that it would most likely not be added to ScummVM since much of it is hard coded, so you would have to be looking at compatibility settings/fixes.

[resin]

When I try to run it in Vista, it says "screen type incorrect". Running in win95 compat mode doesn't make a difference, but if I run in 256 colors, it says "Divide by zero or overflow error"..

However, it will work for me in Win 3.1 in DOSBox. But I wanted to know what Disk 2 is used for? It didn't ask for it during installation, so I'm guessing it's going to ask for it somewhere along the way while playing? Assuming this is true, would I be able to combine the files from Disk 1 and 2 into a single iso, and have the game access this iso whenever Disk 1 or 2 is needed? That way I wouldn't ever have to worry about swapping iso's. Would this work?

[Collector]

It seems to run in ScummVM, which would eliminate the need for CDs or ISOs, however it is not listed as a supported game, so I doubt that it is completable. The 2nd disc does contain game files, so it would be required at some point. If you are doing it through DOSBox, if you imgmount both ISOs you can swap discs at anytime by just pressing Ctrl+F4.

Code: Select all

imgmount d "<path-to-image>\CD1.iso" "<path-to-image>\CD2.iso" -t iso

Change "imgmount d "<path-to-image>" with the actual path to your ISOs.

[resin]

OK thanks. Yes I read somewhere that it's still in development for ScummVM so I'll stick with DOSBox for now. Just one question, when should you use '-t cdrom' and when should use '-t iso' ? As of now my Disk 1 iso is mounted with '-t cdrom' and it works fine, but I see you have '-t iso' in the example above. What's the difference?

[Collector]

Mistake. That should be "-t cdrom -fs iso"