[Originally written August 17 2020]
Once more, I did battle with Creatures 2. I clashed with it in the confines of the Windows XP virtual machine, but to no avail.
Eventually I gave up on this, concluding that the hardware itself is simply too new to run this game (my theory is my fancy modern graphics card lacks the dedicated hardware paths that certain APIs would have used back in the day and therefore has to fall back on emulation, which causes the ever-finicky Creatures 2 to flip out). So it was on to plan B, a dedicated physical system. I dusted off an old Intel NUC and forcibly jammed Windows 7 into it, with significant help from my dad, who was thrilled by the challenge of getting this system off the ground, a process which involved tracking down various drivers and Windows patches that are no longer officially available, among other things.
After a bit of struggling, I concluded that it didn’t like the Remote Desktop. Fine. I plugged it directly into my monitor and a spare keyboard and mouse – so as not to crawl behind my desk and mess with my cables. A little more tinkering, and… voila!
Granted, the hand flickers just a little bit, and the game feels like it might be just slightly laggy (it’s hard to tell without a creature for reference), but it runs. So now I just need to set up some hardware so I can easily switch my speakers, keyboard, and mouse back and forth between the NUC and my normal computer, and do some world setup. That’s for another day, though.
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