The Way To Play

[IS4]

#6842

Hello! I am so glad you are reviewing my favourite game (this is an amazing site!)
If anyone is looking for a way to play it, I think the port is currently the best way to enjoy it, with higher 3D resolution and soundfont support. See the video. It otherwise plays and looks like the original game. There is also a remake of the engine in the works.

You are also welcome to check out the wiki if you are interested, or join the Discord server. 😉

And just as a little showcase of something heavily inspired by Albion, I made this a while ago, in Unity (possible mid-game spoilers).

[Ninetongues]

#6844

Hello! This “port” thing sounds interesting. How do you make it work? You linked to a page with a bunch of downloads of tiny files… What’s next? How do you install and play?

[IS4]

#6846

You download the zip file for your platform (e.g. Albion-Windows-x86-v1.7.2-sdl1.zip) and extract the contents to the Albion directory, where you have ALBION.EXE etc. You run it via Albion.cmd or SR-Main.exe.

It should work straight out of the box, but I recommend editing Albion.cfg and setting Audio_MIDI_Subsystem=bassmidi, in addition to pointing Audio_SoundFont_Path to a soundfont of your choice (basically a soundfont is a sound “palette”, defining the actual sounds for MIDI instruments). I recommend using 8MBGM.SF2, so for example if you download that and place it in the DRIVERS directory (rename it to 8MBGM.SF2), you just set Audio_SoundFont_Path=DRIVERS\8MBGM.SF2 in the config to use it.

[Ninetongues]

#6860

Sorry to keep bugging you, but I’d really like to try that, and I can’t seem to work it all out.

So, I understand that you can’t use GOG version to do that, okay. I used “clean” original version.

Tried both versions:

• Albion-Windows-x86-v1.7.2-sdl1.zip
• Albion-Windows-x86-v1.7.2-sdl2.zip

And I’m getting an error saying I can’t run this program in Widows 64-bit version.

Is the 64-bit version of the port somewhere? Am I missing something?

[pointer]

#6862

Yeah, the Linux port took a bit of tinkering as well.

Admittedly, it’s all written in the readme, but no one reads those..also, who even uses 32-bit these days?

It also still throws a weird error on exit (Gametext: System text block conflict.).

But the hi-res 3d looks rather nice. I think I’ll play it like this.

[IS4]

#6866

We managed to find the issue ‒ the port needs the file ALBION.EXE in the root directory, but in some versions, it is named MAIN.EXE. Simply rename (or copy) MAIN.EXE to ALBION.EXE and it will work.

Another issue is the CD path. As described in the readme, it needs to be relative, so if the CD root is in the CD\ALBION folder, just open SETUP.INI and set SOURCE_PATH=CD\ALBION. This has the added bonus of making your installation portable. 😉

Lastly, these display settings worked the best for me, in Albion.cfg:

Display_ScaledWidth=1080
Display_ScaledHeight=720
Display_Fullscreen=yes
Display_Enhanced_3D_Rendering=yes
Display_MouseCursor=normal
Display_Scaling=advanced
Display_AdvancedScaler=normal
Display_ScalerFactor=max

[Ninetongues]

#6867

I confirm – this works like a charm now. I’ve never played Albion in such comfort before. I can only strongly suggest using this.

[DavidN]

#6875

Oh my god there’s a source port! Did they recreate the hellish loud PC speaker blare at random points during combat, or decide to drop that feature? 😉 Thank you – I’m trying this immediately 🙂

[Tijn]

#6878

Oh god you get the PC speaker beeps too?? I thought it was a bug in my version because of a sound file gone missing or something!

[Tijn]

#6880

Amazing job on the port btw, this looks fantastic