Installing Dragon History on Windows

The game has been tested on Windows 2000 and Windows XP. It should run without problems also on older Windows. It even runs in emulation on Intel iMacs on Parallel Desktop 3.0 with Windows XP! I have never tested the game on Windows Vista or Windows 7, but it will probably run well in the Windows XP emulation mode, and if it doesn't, you can use ScummVM. The installation procedure follows:

Windows XP

  1. Download the language mutation of your choice and unpack it.
  2. (Optional: Run setup.exe. It is sufficient to run this command just once, and it used to be necessary with the old game player. Now the player detects sound cards automatically and this step is not needed.)
  3. If you want to hear the dubbing, download the file with all dialogs and unpack it into the directory with the game. Confirm the rewrite of the old file by the new version, because the present one is just a dummy file with void sounds. If you don't need the dubbing, leave the game as is.
  4. Run dh.bat.

Windows 2000

  1. Install VDM Sound, a program that emulates old sound cards on new operating systems. (May not be necessary.)
  2. Download the language mutation of your choice and unpack it.
  3. (Optional: Run setup.exe with VDM Sound, that is click on it with the right button and select Run with VDM Sound, instead of running it directly. It is sufficient to run this command just once, and it used to be necessary with the old game player. Now the player detects sound cards automatically and this step is not needed.)
  4. If you want to hear the dubbing, download the file with all dialogs and unpack it into the directory with the game. Confirm the rewrite of the old file by the new version, because the present one is just a dummy file with void sounds. If you don't need the dubbing, leave the game as is.
  5. You can launch the game using dh.bat with VDM Sound.

At the moment there is no installation program available that would do this all for you. If anyone wants to write it, please contact me :-)

The game has been compiled using the patched Borland Pascal, hence it won't cause the Runtime Error 200 problem on comtemporary computers. Thanks to Serg Klim from www.old-games.ru, 2 old errors were fixed in 2010: one that blocked the game when c:\autoexec.bat didn't exist, and one that slowed the game unbearably when run on DosBox. If you have already downloaded the game archiv, do it again, because it now contains the fixed binary p.exe.

Installing Dragon History on DosBox

Since the two above-mentioned bugs were fixed, the game runs immediately without any special settings. Here is an old discussion thread on how to run Dragon History on DosBox from the time before.