Knowledge Base

I wanted to find how to play Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? on my modern desktop Linux.

I conducted a bunch of research, but ended up getting it to install and run in Dosbox-X.

The short way

Install in a Dosbox-X instance. This worked on both Devuan GNU+Linux and a non-free operating system. Set the screen color depth to 256 colors before running the game.

Screenshot of Carmen Sandiego running in Dosbox-X

Aborted research

After installing the game in Dosbox-X but before I learned about the 256-color depth, I did some fdisk and dosfstools shenanigans to be able to do this:

Based on fdisk -l hdd.img, block size is 512 and hdd.img1 partition starts at block 63.

sudo mount -o loop,offset=$(( 512 * 63 )) ~/.dosbox-x/hdd.img ~/mnt/1

Then I could copy out C:\Program Files\Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego v3.0\

I configured wine to act like Windows 95. Then I had to install Xephyr, and then run:

# x8 is color depth.
Xephyr -screen 1024x768x8 :1

When I tried running wine Carmen32.exe it complained about quicktime. I mounted the iso and ran

wine ./setup32/qtwsetup/qt32inst.exe

From the iso. This let me install Quicktime 1.2.

Then with Xephyr running like earlier, I could get the game to run, but the colors were way off, like all filtered yellow-blue tint; in that off-color thing where if you could take the window full-screen and then back to windowed, might reset the graphics and display correctly in the olden days of a non-free OS. But I didn't know how to do that with Xephyr.