Just a couple of days after the
public beta of Good Old Games (which will seriously jeopardize my ability to study anything this semester), I discovered the even more dangerous
Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe! This officially declares war on all exam preparations I had in mind for the following months.
Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe (OpenTTD for short) is an open-source clone of the original Transport Tycoon Deluxe engine: all loving 8 bit graphics are accurately reproduced, along with the interface and the well thought-out gameplay. The clone does not include the graphics and the music (you'll have to copy them from your copy of the game). It works perfectly on Vista, supports much higher resolutions than the original game and is an exemplary well behaved application in "windowed" mode (it doesn't block the mouse, can be freely moved and minimized).
In order to install it you can get the latest stable release (0.6.3 at the time) from the project's online repository and copy the binaries somewhere on your computer (I hate installers). Then you need to copy the graphics from your original "Transport Tycoon Deluxe" disc (I bought my copy a couple of years ago, but it didn't work with my notebook's Radeon video adapter):
The selected files in the image can be found in the root folder on the disc. Simply copy them in the "data" subfolder of OpenTTD (or in one of the other suggested folders you'll find in the readme).
Then, in order to get the music working, you should be able to directly copy the "gm" folder on the disc to a newly created "gm" folder where you installed OpenTTD. Unfortunately, the DOS version of the game (and my version, for some unexplicable reason) includes the MIDI files as the packed archive "GM.CAT". Cirdan, an user of the OpenTTD forums, mercifully posted a simple C program that analyzes those CAT files and extracts the music files. I had to adapt the code to work on the Visual C++ compiler and to automatically generate the correct file names:
Download the source code (.C)
Put the file in some directory, along with the packed GM.CAT file. Compile it:
cl /MD gmext.c
and run the executable (you can also download the compiled utility directly if you don't want to compile it). This will (should) produce a lot of gm_ttXX.gm files (22 in total) that must be copied into the "OpenTTD/gm" folder.
Now go enjoy Transport Tycoon in all its glory! 
As you may have noticed: the new website is up! 
After a long pause, I'm finally getting back to my series of XNA posts which I started for the 
