Alpha Centauri
8 comments
·June 20, 2025wing-_-nuts
If gog ever manages to get the rights to rerelease civ II, I'd gladly pay $80 for a copy I could just click and run on windows and linux. Yes, there are copies on abandonware sites, but the sound is almost always jank, the soundtrack is gone and the advisors don't work (they really added a lot of character to the game!). The nostalgia of childhood is broken. I've tried everything, up to and including running win 3.1 with sound blaster drivers on dosbox to no avail. This is my white whale
glimshe
Is this an emulation problem or are the online copies corrupted? You can buy an original copy of the game on eBay and run it in Dosbox-X or Dosbox-staging, both well ahead vanilla Dosbox in features.
Also, I bet the Internet archive or exoDOS will have a perfect copy. The latter is a one click experience. Check the laws in your country for whether these are legal.
mirashii
There's a number of active communities about still playing the game, including /r/alphacentauri on reddit, a discord server at https://discord.gg/7BkcvXUX , and https://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?action=community
I know the last time I picked it up, there were a well respected set of patches from scient (a quick google pointed me to https://github.com/DrazharLn/scient-unofficial-smacx-patch ). Somewhere in here is a pre-done distribution you can just click and run with for modern windows.
ptmcc
SMAC was a really great game, ahead of its time in many ways and laid some groundwork for ideas later worked into Civs 3+.
It's a shame the totally-not-a-SMAC-sequel Civ: Beyond Earth did not not do it justice.
swyx
so like, i know there are some civ clones out there... has anyone tried to make an OpenAlphaCentauri? i'd love to hack on this but i dont have the time or gamedev experience to take it 0 to 1....
bbarnett
I recall a C64 game(or Amiga, but I'm fairly sure C64) where you settled the solar system. The Moon, Mars, Venus, Titan, etc.
You even had to genetically engineer your colonists, so they could withstand the environments. Fun game, but I can't find it via Google.
If anyone knows this game, please share. I'd love to play it again.
swyx
teaching you to fish: https://chatgpt.com/share/6855db77-b474-8012-863e-8cf8d6e415...
> Alas, today Alpha Centuari feels far more believable than Civilization and its sang-froid about the inevitability of perpetual progress. These days, Alpha Centauri’s depiction of bickering, bitterly entrenched factions warring over the very nature of truth, progressing not at all spiritually or morally even as their technology runs wild in a hundred different perilous directions, strikes many as the more accurate picture of the nature of our species. People play Alpha Centauri to engage with modern life; they play Civilization to escape from it.
wow. ive never understood why AC worked while Civ5/6 fell off the map for me, but i think this was it.