Double click on it.īack in your Windows computer, find that file you downloaded and unzipped, 'Sundog - Frozen Legacy v3.0 (1985)(FTL).st' and drag it in to the VirtualBox window. You should see several folders, including one called sundog.

Then inside the VM, click on the folder icon to open the file explorer. In VirtualBox menu, select Devices > Drag and Drop > Bidrectional. You want the one called ' Sundog - Frozen Legacy v3.0 (1985)(FTL).st' which should be 360KB uncompressed. However, for copyright reasons Wladimir did not include the actual game, so let's get that next.ĭownload the game ROMs from here: This will get a zip file with three different Sundog ROMs. Inside your Ubuntu linux VM, open a shell (hit the lower-left-corner button and type 'terminal') and type the following: git clone sudo apt-get install libreadline-dev libsdl2-dev libgles2-mesa-devcd sundog/srcmakeThis pull down Wladimir's code and some libraries it needs, and compile them. Install the VirtualBox 'Guest Additions' - this will allow you to drag files on to your new Ubuntu VM. Install Ubuntu in it by following this excellent step-by-step guide here: Sundog in Ubuntu in VirtualBox in Windows The Stepsĭownload and install VirtualBox (a hypervisor, which is kind of like an emulator for OSes). So with that out of the way, here are the explicit steps to get Sundog working on a Windows box without crashing! Everything mentioned is free and open source (except the original game of course, which you need a time machine to pay for). Fortunately, that too can be gotten around, by using a virtual machine. However, it is designed to be run on Linux, and I use Windows. He very helpfully open sourced his work, which is available on Github here: along with an explanation of what was involved. van der Laan, has (for reasons known only to him) decided to port Sundog to modern graphics and import libraries. The person that made that post, Wladimar J. It didn't actually defeat pirates (does anything?), but the fact that, 35 years later, it happens to break emulation is just one of life's little surprises. I was stumped.Īfter some digging, I discovered this post on an obscure Atari forum: The tl dr is that the Red Screen of Death I had become so familiar with was not an emulator failure, it was an intentional 'feature' of Sundog designed to defeat pirating and cheating via save-file editing. I assumed this was an emulator failure of some kind, but even after trying four different ROMs, three TOS versions, and innumerable emulator config settings, same result. However, the game will crash to a blank red screen. It takes some fiddling, but you can get the game to work this way, for a couple of minutes. In theory, you should be able to play Sundog the way you play any old game - find a ROM, open it in an emulator, and go to town. Besides, I never had an Apple, so I wanted to play the game of my youth, which is a lot better. The graphics were worse, it's joystick-driven rather than mouse-driven, and the game has less features than the Atari ST port a year later. If you played Sundog on the Apple IIe, and want to relive that experience, you can do so directly from the Internet Archive here: However, it's not nearly as good a game.

Sundog box art Wrong way 1: Apple IIe via Dosbox If you don't care about why emulation doesn't work and just want the steps to play this great old game, skip to the bottom. It took a while and had many wrong turns, but I finally have it working, so I am documenting the steps necessary while everything is fresh in my mind. I've spent the last two days down a rat-hole trying to get the ST version to work through an emulator. Hi there, this is a post about Sundog, a surprisingly good old-school game for the Apple and Atari ST. This guide is for people googling 'sundog crash red screen' like I was. Great! I assume those people will never see this post. Edit: Apparently I did not make this clear enough - Sundog works for some people in normal emulators like Steem or Hatari.

Sumdog game