Wasteland on my phone? Yes! Sorta...

[Artif3x]

Update 3/27/12: Check http://wasteland.inxile-entertainment.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=765&p=11823#p16683 to see a hackish solution I came up with to get this running on your phone.

Original post:

I've been digging around on the web, trying to find out if there's an iOS version of the first Wasteland. It's been years since I played it, and would love to get back into it on my phone. Here's what I found out:

Back in October of last year TouchArcade reported on a company called Elite Systems who was planning to release a bunch of 8-bit classic games on iOS (http://toucharcade.com/2011/10/24/a-loo ... of-plenty/). Then followed up with another story saying that Elite had copyright issues with one of the titles, resulting in a slight delay. They go on to say that their collection should include a handful of classic Interplay titles as well (!!), including The Bard's Tale, Dragon Wars, Neuromancer and...Wasteland!

This was a huge deal to me, and I'd love to play the old Bard's Tale game again, but Wasteland?! Hell, yes!

So, that led me to Elite Systems's web site (http://www.elite-systems.co.uk/elite/) where you can see a couple of ads up, one for their ZX Spectrum pack (already available), and the other for the promised Elite Collection, which doesn't contain Wasteland, but which would provide the in-app purchasing platform for it later.

Following the iTunes link there takes you to Apple's site (http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/elite-co ... 90300?mt=8), and a huge let-down. Apparently, Elite Systems has been silent for over a month. There's no Elite Collection yet, and no feedback from the company.

Crap.

Not to be deterred, I went on to find the Commodore 64 app in the iOS, thinking it would allow you to load some of the archive files that many PC emulators would. Come to find out, they're having issues with copyrights as well. They yanked one of their titles after a recent update, and upset quite a few of their users.

Double crap.

Here I sit, with no Wasteland to carry about in my pocket. I know quite a few of the Inxile folks were part of Interplay back in the day. For them, my question is: is anyone actively working on this? Do you know the state of the copyright situation with Elite Systems? Inxile has bought the rights to the original Wasteland, so wouldn't they have had to contact you? Are there any plans to resurrect the old Wasteland on a mobile platform?

It seems to me that getting this out there would really whip up some nostalgic fervor for Wasteland 2, and generate some significant cash-flow for the team if the copyrights do now reside with Inxile. Thoughts from the Inxile team?

Anybody else succeeded in getting this on their phone?

[Brother None]

They can't even re-release it for PC. Let's wait until they gain the rights to do that before calling for an iOS port.

[Ausir]

Unfortunately, EA has the rights to the original game.

[Artif3x]

Ok, this is a little complex, but I did manage to get this working on iOS.

Wait, wait, before you go bananas, realize that this isn't an ideal situation, but it does work.

First, you need to get Wasteland! Duh! Here's the abandonia link to the PC version that you can download for free (http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/436/Wasteland.html). Then get it running via DOSBox (http://www.dosbox.com/). Set your DOSBox preferences so that the upscaling will make Wasteland take up most of your screen at 1024x768 (3x works well).

Now, you're going to need to buy SplashTop Remote (http://www.splashtop.com/remote) for your phone. I picked it up for a cool 99 cents. It's really useful for all kinds of stuff, and is worth the buck. It works passingly well for this too.

Got that installed? Good.

Next, install Splashtop Streamer (http://www.splashtop.com/streamer/download?from=remotedesktop) on the PC that is running Wasteland in DOSBox.

Set up Splashtop Streamer with your google login info so that you can discover your PC over the internet. This is in the settings for Splashtop Streamer in your system tray.

Start Wasteland in DOSBox on your PC.

Pull out your trusty iOS phone (or Android--I don't see any reason this won't work as well for android), and pull up your PC via the SplashTop link.

Whoa! There's wasteland, running on your home PC, but you can play it on your phone via the remote connection. Now you'll see why You set the scaling so huge. You can't run in fullscreen, unfortunately, but you can get close with scaling. Wasteland for PC's mouse-enabled interface is what makes this a viable way to play the game. Just tap the map to move, and the buttons or character records to issue commands. The buttons could be larger, but you can always pinch-to-zoom if necessary.

Not an ideal setup, especially when your 3G/LTE connection isn't the best, but this is at least a way to play until somebody bites the bullet and ports the game to native iOS/Android.

[kasra5004]

I downloaded a c64 version and an emulator for it, on pc it runs fine but in Android after setting it up, the page goes black and then nothing. Any idea?

[Artif3x]

I downloaded a c64 version and an emulator for it, on pc it runs fine but in Android after setting it up, the page goes black and then nothing. Any idea?

I imagine you're talking about an Android C64 emulator. I haven't tried out any of those, but if I had to hazard a guess, you likely have something wrong in your emulator configuration, or the disk image files you're using are improperly labelled, or aren't labelled at all.

I've tried the C64 emulator version in this set up as well, and it runs fine, but demands keyboard input instead of mouse input.

[kasra5004]

I'm not sure what you are saying, this is what I did , I downloaded a zip file that contaned 7 files, one was version info and the others were wastlnd0.d64,wastlnd1.d64 and so on, after extraction I ran the emulator (mobile c64) and then I autostarted wastlnd0.d64. And the rest is history!

[Artif3x]

I'm not sure what you are saying, this is what I did , I downloaded a zip file that contaned 7 files, one was version info and the others were wastlnd0.d64,wastlnd1.d64 and so on, after extraction I ran the emulator (mobile c64) and then I autostarted wastlnd0.d64. And the rest is history!

Each of those .d64 files corresponds to a floppy disk. You probably have the same version I do, and the disks themselves are labelled very poorly. Try loading off of one of the other disks.

[kasra5004]

It worked I had to try four of them but finally it worked, thank you.