After all that talk about travel, I’m kicking this off with something random instead! (This is actually a repost of a note I wrote on facebook a few years ago but I’d like to give it a wider audience.)
Baldur’s Gate is quite possibly my favourite PC game of all time. Back in August 2008 I bought the 4-in-1 boxset to play it again on the laptop I’d recently purchased. I could hardly believe how difficult it was to get it running smoothly on a (then?) high-spec machine. I spent days sifting through forums, tweaking settings and doing multiple installs/uninstalls, until I finally worked how to get it running beautifully:
- Install Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate: Tales of the Sword Coast.
- Patch with the 5512 (non DX8) patch from here. (Seemingly no longer available from the current Bioware website.) It’s also possible newer re-releases of Baldur’s Gate will include this patch in a folder on the disc.
- Patch again with the Widescreen mod from The Gibberling’s Three and set to your desired resolution (1440×900 for me). This is optional but if you do install it you get to see so much more of the map during in-game play, it’s awesome. :D
- Go to Start > Run > dxdiag.
- Go to the Display tab and disable DirectDraw Acceleration.
- Start a new game in Baldur’s Gate.
- Go into the Graphic settings and make sure they’re set to 16 bit. (I couldn’t find any success stories from anyone running 32 bit.)
- Enable Software Transparent BLT.
- DON’T disable Full Screen mode (this gave me heaps of errors).
- Optional: up the framerate in Baldur.ini then Config.exe.
My system specs:
Windows XP
2.4 GHz dual processor
3GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics card
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