I decided to try running Cedega again. I have yet to ever get it to successfully run a windows game but having payed them for quite a long time I thought I would give it a try again. I think my main problem is having an ATI card when their main focus is Nvidia but then again I never thought things would be perfect but I had always hoped to be able to use it for at least Counter Strike which I got addicted to in college. So when they said they got it working with Counter Strike: Source I had to try. No dice. The Half-Life 2 demo doesn’t work so I am not enthusiastic about CS:S, which is based off the HL-2 engine, working.

I did however dig up my old Casper game. It was my first commercial programming project and I still get nostalgia for it once in awhile. While it was completely unplayable I did manage to get past the first few screens before graphics corruption made me kill the process. Perhaps I can find an NVidia board lying around and try it again. Here are some screen shots:


Opening screen - you can already seen the corruption. I worked for the since defunct Morning Star Multimedia. The rest of the names are companies we licensed Casper or code off of.


That blob in front of the fountain is Casper. It seems that all the animations show up like this. The graphics were amazing for the time and hardware we had. It was released in 1997. Each scene took a day to render and then we had to reduce the colors to fit into a 256 color palette. Making cell animation look good in 256 colors with lighting and shadows was a tough task. I wish I could show the insides of the the Manor. The lighting is amazing there, but alas I can’t get that far.


This is the intro movie. There is casper waiting for you on the doorsteps. The movie uses the smacker codex and displays well through Cedega. The biggest problem is after that scene the last frame of the movie doesn’t go away and the game becomes unplayable. Such a shame.


Ah my one credit. I was supposed to get Lead programmer since I did everything from the code design, to implementation with a few other programmer chipping in here and there. They were going to give me the grand title of “Other Programmers” until our audio/video man went to bat for me - thanks Chris. One thing is for sure, the guy listed on top of me is the least deservings of that title. I only ended up doing what I did because no code was being produced and I didn’t want my first project to never see the light of day.

[read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]