Moo2 under WinXP

June 13, 2005 8:16 PM

Has anyone gotten Master of Orion 2: Battle At Antares to run under Windows XP?

I just found my old copy of this wonderful game from 1996 and installed in on my machine, along with the 1.31 patch. It will run, sort of. But it won't allow any changes to the game settings, crashing to the desktop with the message "settings file MOX.set is missing or invalid.." The file's there, and NOT set read-only. Most importantly the designing and refitting ships buttons are greyed out, which makes the game pointless and unplayable. Any ideas?

posted by mojohand to computers & internet (7 comments total)

I have an abandonware copy of this game that runs without the CD on WinXp. I tried a quick game, and I was able to retrofit and design ships in a quick test game I did. I designed a ship on the first turn and went through the turns until the ship was built -- I had no problems.

I also have no MOX.set file in the game's directory, so I did some digging around on google, and found this. Perhaps you should move this file to another directory and see if everything works? If it still doesn't work, you could always move it back to the game's directory.
posted by sleslie at 8:41 PM on June 13, 2005

I have a copy and it works just fine on XP pro...
posted by schyler523 at 10:05 PM on June 13, 2005

According to the DOSBox website's list of compatible games, it supports Master of Orion 2. The support indicator is almost at a maximum, which means the game is fully playable and most likely beatable, but it might crash on you here and there with the odd error. DOSBox is a free DOS environment emulator (for various platforms, among them WinXP) designed primarily to make old games playable. It's also free. Download here. Typically it requires some fiddling with configuration files before sound and memory allocation works perfectly, but (a) it's not that complicated, and (b) there are plenty of easy-to-use graphical front-ends to facilitate this (see the download page.)
posted by ori at 10:18 PM on June 13, 2005

DOSBox works great for me. Sound is the only thing that may require a bit of fiddling, but recent versions of DOSBox simulate a SoundBlaster and pipe the result into the Windows, so that problem seems largely to be licked too.
posted by bonehead at 6:07 AM on June 14, 2005

I still have my old copy of it, which I actually installed with no problems last week. Runs like a charm.

What sort of problems are you having?

On some systems, you may need to fiddle with the "Compatibility" tab. You get to that by right clicking on the actual executable and selecting "Properties"
posted by jaded at 7:31 AM on June 14, 2005

I changed to a new Win XP computer this week . One of the first things I did was see if my beloved MOO2, which I had played on my WIN95 and WIN98 computers, would still work. It did. No problems, except the screen scrolls a little too fast during combat. So I'll just use the combat mini-map to do the scrolling.
posted by CrunchyFrog at 12:45 PM on June 14, 2005

I had problems running it when I tried last year some time. I went to a forum and got a patch that helped. I think this is it, but it's been so long I can't be sure:

Click Me.

Also, my moment of MetaFame, I did a huge chunk of the art in that game. Always glad to see that it's still being played. Err--and if the art is too dated and cringeworthy, that was someone else's bits. Yeah huh.
posted by zueod at 1:57 PM on June 14, 2005