Hi-rez released all of the tribes and earthsiege games

[Goggles2114]

http://www.tribesuniverse.com/

The current rights-holders to the Tribes franchise are giving away most of the franchise. There doesn't seem to be Stella 7, Cyberfront, or a few others, but while Tribes 1 and 2 were made free as a tribes Vengeance promo, Earsiege and Starsiege are now also available.

Curiously they're going with ISOs of everything rather than attempting to incorporate community patches, meaning you're kinda on your own where actually getting things to work are concerned. Also as of the time of this post the Tribes 1/Starsiege combo ISO only has Starsiege. That may get fixed in the future.

I THINK the two earthsiege games are good, but Starsiege, Tribes 2, and Vengeance need a little work to get going.

Following instructions are courtesy of Reddit.

Earthsiege:

After installing DOSBox you can then use the Sierra installer to get Earthsiege I to work. I can confirm that it works. The page also has a link to run Earthsiege II on modern 64bit systems. I could run it but ran into an audio issue, something about _INMM.DLL.

Starsiege:

http://mossbackgeezers.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&p=7252: How to get working on a modern box (instructions are for windows 7.)

Mega link (advise that this gets mirrored.) No-CD Patch

Replacement Master Server.

Tribes 1:

Frankly you're better off going with PlayTribes. Playtribes is an update that was in progress after Dynamix had bought back the franchise rights from Sierra and had intended to launch a quake-live like service that let you play the original tribes 1 from a browser window. This version includes better support for higher resolutions, OpenGL, and other minor things or possibly not so minor because I dunno what they are. Sadly the project got scrapped... when Hi-Rez bought the franchise. However someone leaked the code for what was done, which was basically everything workable so far as I'm aware of, and put it on the internet. This is the superior version of tribes 1.

Tribal War thread about PlayTribes: http://www.tribalwar.com/forums/archive/t-630310.html

Tribal War thread about the 1.141 'after hope' patch: http://www.tribalwar.com/forums/archive/t-663331.html

If those do not do anything useful please discuss, will edit as I can find new information. It is weird o'clock here.

Tribes 2:

http://tribesnext.com/ will have both game, and patch to get going with the community master server. That site's version is the installer distributed as promo to tribes vengeance whereas the tribes universe link is for an ISO.

Areal Assault: This is a PS2 game. I'm not sure why they're releasing the ISO and i have no idea if a community server exists. If anyone knows how to rip assets from this please share your wisdom since this is basically the ps2 version of tribes 2 with a few different vehicles, different turret behavior, and a different set of tutorial missions.

Tribes Vengeance:

http://tribesrevengeance.com/. That site will have basically everything you need to get going between setup, general tutorials, and I think they've got mapping utilities up it's been awhile.

Reddit Thread about game lore.

Edit: The Exiled's Wiki is back up and functioning proper. Also as a note their site offers downloads for Playtribes, Tribes 2, Vengeance, and probably others. This wiki covers everything the franchise has to offer. I'm serious it is the most exaustive document I've found on the web about the in universe as well as out of universe material on the franchise all in one place.

This needs backing up if it hasn't been already.

 

[Seattleite]

OH GOD YES. I have been waiting YEARS to play Earthsiege II again. Thank you just for POSTING this.

EDIT:

Spoke too soon, it doesn't work. Because of fucking course it doesn't, it was stupid of me to believe it for a single second. Every single person who has ever said they can make Earthsiege II work has been a liar since 2005, why should that change now?

 

[BTGBullseye]

OH GOD YES. I have been waiting YEARS to play Earthsiege II again. Thank you just for POSTING this.
EDIT:

Spoke too soon, it doesn't work. Because of fucking course it doesn't, it was stupid of me to believe it for a single second.

Yeah, you're gonna want to make a VM with Windows 98 or earlier to run it... It hooks kernel functions is why.

 

[Seattleite]

Yeah, but this guy claimed it worked on modern systems. And it very, very much does not. Since I have never managed to get any VMs working, I can't play this game at all and haven't been able to for over a decade.

 

[BTGBullseye]

You have Steam? If you do, contact me on there, and I can walk you through setting up a VirtualBox install of 98... (you need to download a disc image for 98/98se, and the VirtualBox program first though)

 

[Seattleite]

Why not just PM?

 

[BTGBullseye]

Harder to do a back and forth conversation if you have problems.

 

[Seattleite]

My schedule and circumstances make Steam a non-option.

 

[BTGBullseye]

Well, it's a really simple setup... Once you get those two things, go ahead and install VirtualBox. Once that is installed, you need to make a new virtual environment. It'll ask you for a name for the environment, the type of OS, and the actual OS you intend to install. Make whatever name you want, choose Microsoft Windows, and Windows 98.

When you click 'next' it'll ask you how much RAM to give your virtual machine. Do either 256MB or 512MB, but don't go higher than 1158MB or Windows 98 will have issues booting. (this permanently allocates your system RAM in that amount to the VM whenever the VM is running, so make sure you have enough for your base OS to do everything it needs to)

Next, it asks you if you want to create a virtual hard drive, use the default "Create a virtual hard drive now" option. Use the default hard drive type. (VDI) Next you get to decide if you want the drive to be a fixed size, or to expand dynamically as you use more space... I recommend you do a fixed size, and allocate no more than 60GB to it. This will create a file on your drive of your chosen size, and it will store everything about your virtual system.

From here, you simply start the VM, choose the Windows 98 install disc image in the VirtualBox menu, and restart the VM. Treat the VM as you would a normal computer system, because it will react like one. Of course there are more detailed settings that would need to be set for games that require better graphics capabilities, so if you need a walkthrough for those settings, PM me.