EarthSiege -- earlier demo found, the other restored

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MrFlibble
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EarthSiege -- earlier demo found, the other restored

Post by MrFlibble »

A while ago I downloaded the playable demo of EarthSiege from here, only to find out that it did not want to work. I had no idea how to fix that and left it for a while, until sometime later, I found a slightly different version of the same demo on a magazine coverdisk (specifically, this one), which I was able to install and run.

As you probably know, Sierra used those intricate two-way installer routines that will install something if it's run from a CD, and just configure sound and other relevant hardware if it runs from an HDD. No doubt, this was in part made so as to facilitate copy protection.

The demo as provided from the Sierra Help Demo Downloads page is the installer from a CD. However, it is missing a crucial part -- the BAT files which are needed to actually make the installer install the game in of three available languages: English, French or German. Based on the BAT file I grabbed from the earlier demo (which is English language only), I was able to get the three-language one back to install as intended.

Here are the two demos zipped up: Note that to install either, you need to mount the folder with the installer files as CD-ROM in DOSBox.

By tinkering with the CFG files, I was also able to produce pre-installed versions of each demo that are not tied to the CD in any way, but I generally don't like this method. So a simpler way I came up with recently is a properly installed demo with a BAT file that runs the mounting and other DOSBox commands to get it work as originally intended. You can get this version here (also has the play-in-browser function). The user can simply drag-and-drop the launch BAT file onto the DOSBox icon for this to work.
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Re: EarthSiege -- earlier demo found, the other restored

Post by Tawmis »

Cool find!
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MrFlibble
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Re: EarthSiege -- earlier demo found, the other restored

Post by MrFlibble »

BTW, since I haven't played the full game, can anyone tell if the demo mission is a special level or a part of the full campaign? YouTube playthroughs are little help because IIRC there are branching missions and some may not be shown.
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Re: EarthSiege -- earlier demo found, the other restored

Post by Tawmis »

I've never done the Earthseige games myself.
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