I’ve been on the web today, mainly looking for add-on levels for Dungeon Keeper.  (If you’ve never seen it, pop over to A Nocturne For The Dungeon Keeper and download the demo.)

Add-on levels

• Dungeon-Keeper.net lots of levels and others, but the site is mainly in French.
• oetealar‘s site has about 40 levels; it’s on GeoCities so go grab it NOW or use The Internet Archive.
• Tim Daish maintains an archive of about 70 maps
• Sandra Linkletter has a set of home-made multiplayer maps
• Robert Hubby has a level in his resume
• Download a pack of 50 levels from the old location of oetalar’s site
• 3 more levels available on the download page at Order of the Mage

Level editors and other Utilities

• Adikted is a freeware editor.
• Tim Daish maintains the Dungeon keeper Level Manager and Script Verifier

Strategy guides and walkthroughs

• Lisa Shea has an excellent walkthrough available.
• GameSpot‘s strategy guide
• The unauthorised guide from Fall of Darkness

I’ve also been writing my own for ages so expect a few packs of levels to appear here sooner or later…

Originally started by Kevin Lawton, the bochs project – whose motto is “Think inside the bochs” – maintains the bochs emulator. Bochs aims to emulate – at a reasonable speed and with a fair degree of accuracy – an x86-based 32-bit PC with the AMD 64-bit extensions. It can run most operating systems inside it (as “guest operating systems”, if you prefer the VMWare term), such as Windows (3.1, 95, Vista…), Linux, Minix or one of the BSDs. (They even collect disk images as well). In addition, Bochs also runs on loads of operating systems as well – Windows, BeOS, OSX, Irix, Solaris… (more…)

Fabrice Bellard’s excellent QEMU is up to version 0.9.0 (a Windows port is in alpha stage).

So far, QEMU is the first thing I’ve found that runs Windows 98 and Dungeon Keeper properly.  Virtual PC was fast but couldn’t run anything other than the DOS version, and had problems with screen refresh.  Bochs was slow and clunky.  VritualBox couldn’t run the DirectX version either, and wouldn’t run the DOS version at all.  DOSbox was fine – but had problems with the integrated graphics on the laptop.

QEMU was fast, especially with the kqemu acceleration layer (which works fine on Windows Vista Home Premium, folks).  Couldn’t get the networking going, but it wasn’t really too much to worry about – getting the main game going was the main priority.