Leisure Suit Larry's Casino 'startroom' not working

[cavefish]

I recently decided to install and play Leisure Suit Larry's Casino for the first time since (probably) 98 or 99. Man, what a throwback! Of course, now that WON.net is offline, some features are hard to unlock, like upgrading your room to a better one. While searching the net, I stumbled across the extras page on this site, which reads:

There is a -startroom=xxx command line option. This will start the game in any specific room in the game, unfortunately it uses numbers to identify the room. For example if your command line to run LSL Casino is c:\sierra\lcasino\lcasino.exe then changing it to c:\sierra\lcasino\lcasino.exe -startroom=20000 will start the game at the WON.net login screen. If you have Windows95 or 98, right click on the LSL Casino desktop icon and select properties. Change the command line to include the option you wish by adding a space, then -startroom=, then the corresponding number.

I tried the cheat as it was described on the site, but it didn't work. I've attached a screenshot from my Windows 98 VM where I'm running the game.

All it does is take me to my room. Is there a step I'm missing, perhaps?

Anyway, if I can get this working, I'm wondering if I can find the extra rooms that aren't available offline, since the data is already in the game files somewhere and not actually online.

Al Lowe released his game design document for the game a few years ago (available here). There are some descriptions of the upgraded rooms on page 15 on that document.

Thanks for the help, anyone crazy enough to still have this game laying around!

[Collector]

You mentioned that you were using a VM to play this because of the 16-bit color depth limitation. You can assess other color depths in the 'Advanced settings' part of the display properties. clicking the 'List All Modes' button will show all of the other modes. You can select the same resolution/refresh rate that you already have, but select sigh color (16-bit). You can make this easier by extracting the two files in the zip into your installed folder and starting the game with 'Larry's Casino.bat'. This will use ResChange.exe to lower your color depth to start the game and automatically restore it when you quit the game.

Very little of the game is playable without WON. It might be possible to hack the game to skip the WON check, but you would still not have anyone to play with. There are a couple of people here that might be capable if they see this thread. There is the WON2 network that the Half-Life fans setup after WON was shut down. Don't know what it would take to connect with that. They do have a forum that might offer some help.