Howto: Play XCom: Enemy Unknown using DosBox

In my opinion XCom: Enemy Unknown, also released as XCom: UFO Defense, is one of the best computer games of all time. The issue is that on modern computers with current operating systems it can be hard to install and play. If you are lucky enough to have a version that will install on your flavor of Windows you run into an issue where your proccessor is too fast for the game. Things will just happen way too fast.

To get around this issue you can use an awesome program called DosBox. DosBox will emulate a DOS enviroment and handle timing so that the game will play correctly.

What we are going to do

So here I'm going to walk you though installing and setting up DosBox to run XCom: Enemy Unknown. These directions will assume that you are using Windows XP or Vista. If you are running Linux you will probably need to make some adjustments to these directions.

Things you'll need

You'll need to download DosBox and to download XCom: Enemy Unknown [via].

Do it

1. Install DosBox using it's installer.
2. Create a directory that will act as your C: drive. Personally, I have use C:\dosbox.
3. Extract the XCom zip to that folder. Now, you should have an xcom directory in C:\dosbox.
4. Run DosBox
5. In at the DosBox prompt type:
   mount c c:\dosbox
c:
cd xcom
go

Congradulations you are now playing one of the best computer games ever made.

BitTorrent

I always feel ripped off when using peer-to-peer file sharing and my upload is more than my download.

Snack Food Zen

No matter what snacks you have, you always want something else to munch on.

Google Docs Initiative Tracker

As some of you know I'm running a 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons game. And you might have also have noticed that I recently got a new computer. So of course I wanted to bring these things together. And to do this I used Google Docs.

I did this in two ways. First, I had a notes document for me to jot down anything that I needed to remember. This worked okay but really wasn't all that much better than a peice of paper. Then I also had a spreadsheet to do initiative.

This spreadsheet was really helpful. I set it up with a column for the initiative, a name, and then a couple columns for tracking monster hit points.But what's great is that spreadsheets in Google Docs have this sort bar that you can position. So I put it under my header row. Then when we needed to use initiative I would get all the initiatives from everybody, use the sort bar to put everything in order and go. Then if something happened and the order changed I would just assign that person an appropriate new number and hit the sort bar again. It worked great! This is the best initiative tracker I've used.

What do you use for an address book?

I would really like to know. I can't seem to find a system that works for me. Do you have have physical address book? Is there a program on your computer that you use? Do you use your phone?

I already broke it

So that new laptop I just got... I killed it's operating system the other day. It wasn't my fault though. If Asus put a decent OS on their Eee PCs I wouldn't hav killed it.

It started because all I wanted to do was to install the latest version of Audacity on it. I wanted to do this for recording my podcast. The operating system that was on the machine really didn't support installing any new software. So I found some instructions for installing an older version of Audacity. That actually worked. Then when I unsintalled that and tried to install the version that I wanted I ran into a bunch of problems saying that the laptop didn't have some prereuisits installed. And it was when I went to upgrade those prerequisits that the OS died. The next time I went to boot it up it just hanged.

Don't worry it wasn't destroyed. I eneded up installing Ubuntu on it and now it works fine. In fact I'm writing this on it right now. And, yes, Ubuntu did let me install the version of Audacity that I wanted.

A Look Back at Xobni

A little bit ago I wrote a post about Xobni. I thought that it might be a good time and let you know what I think of it now that I've used it for a couple months.

For me Xobni was not worth it. Since I installed it I only found a use for it once. Perhaps this is because i was using it on my work computer that is connected to an exchange server with a global address book. I simply never needed to look anybody up in Xobni because 90% of the people that I email are in that global address book. There was only one time that I used Xobni for this.

The rest of the features in Xobni just aren't very useful. While it's need to see stats on when and how much people email you I never found a use for it. It also has this interesting fact thing that shows up every now and again but it always shows that same stat about your email usage.

I would say that Xobni isn't worth the money but it's free.