I'm back, baby!
Great. now all we need is a way to get Lemmings Revolution to run on Windows 7.
Seriously if you have any insight into this as well, that would be awesome. Revolution doesn't run properly on Windows 7.
I tried and tried and tried, but I couldn't get Lemming Revolution to run correctly on Windows 7. The best I could do in 7 proper was a no-audio, black-UI setup, which wasn't very good.
Then I tried running it in virtual machines with Windows 98, Windows XP and
Debian installed.
Windows VirtualPC doesn't appear to support 3D acceleration whatsoever, and even with the
VirtualBox 3D driver it didn't work. The game's got some old-fashioned hardware enumeration going on and if it doesn't find a controller it likes, it just up and quits. It didn't like VirtualBox.
One thing I
did have some success with was
Wine, which is specifically designed to run old 32-bit Windows programs within a Linux environment. The issue here wasn't that the game didn't run properly; it was that it was
unplayably slow because it had to translate all the Direct3D functions the game uses. If it used OpenGL it would be just fine, but that's not the case.
So I took a moment to install Linux on my machine (different partition) and... Wine didn't work. Something about an invalid parameter to
glXCreateContext()? Whatever the case, I think what happened was they said "Hey, it works on 32-bit, so let's just compile it 64-bit and not test it! Profit! I mean non-profit!"
Fortunately, AMD put out some sweet Linux drivers for ATI cards since the last time I tried running Linux on this box, so that's a plus.
Re-installing the 32-bit Debian and setting up Wine, everything worked like a charm. Audio sounds great, the 3D is spot-on, and the UI elements look exactly as they should. Well, not like they were supposed to in 2002 (look at the balloon and clock icons; the colors are whack), but it looked like that on XP, so whatcha gonna do?
There were two curious problems, however. Running the game full-screen, I wasn't able to pan left when holding down the right mouse button. Yeah, like... it would only rotate clockwise. That wasn't an issue in windowed mode, but the cursor positioning was a bit off and I guess right-click is what releases the cursor from the Wine window? Neither makes the game unplayable, but they're both somewhat of an inconvenience. Is there maybe a way to pan around the cylinder without using the mouse? That'd be ideal.
So that's it, then. We can still play Lemmings Revolution this day and age, but not through Windows 7 directly. At least it's not gone to the clutches of time.