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For a rambling, disjointed list of a mix of both related, and unrelated reasons, I decided to play Dungeon Siege.
Found my DSII hardpack of discs, but not my DSI install disc. Its somewhere in the house. Went through a dozen or so boxes, couldn't find it, bought it on Steam for $7. Discovered some bright, enterprising person or persons has made available an (enormous) HIGH-DEF skin for it. I go to download that and it requires the first Expansion Pack, Legends of Aranna, which I also have somewhere in this house. I find the first install disc for the Expansion Pack in my DSII hardpack and can only assume the second install/play disc is in the DSI case - the one I cannot find. But! Knowing myself so very well, I pull out my trusty aged external with all my game ISOs on it, because I know I made backups of every physical media I own for times exactly like this. Including, of course the game I just bought on Steam for $7. Not quite as smart as I think I am as it turns out.
AT ANY RATE I have a mix of ISO and UIF on my backup drive and ye olde standby MagicISO stopped working on Windows awhile back so I look up how to convert UIF-to-ISO and apparently there's a tiny installable app named (oddly enough) UIF-to-ISO and it looks eerily familiar, so I bring up the Window search bar and sure enough it is already installed on my system, so yay, but apparently I also only have the first Expansion Pack disc as an UIF (now ISO) and not the SECOND disk. WTF is even wrong with me?
Clicked the VPN button in the address bar of Opera on my linux workstation and I'm suddenly sipping vodka in the Ukraine. I torrent (I know, I know) a cracked verison (its not like I already don't own this game twice) and pull down...three (3) disks??? All in *.mdf format. Thankfully I already have iat on a beefy box I made to convert SGI disk label *.img files (not that that worked):
root@beefy:/xfer/ds_loa/Disks# iat DISK1.mdf DISK1.iso Iso9660 Analyzer Tool v0.1.3 by Salvatore Santagati Licensed under GPL v2 or later Detect Signature RAW at 2440 Detect Signature RAW at 4888 Detect Signature RAW at 7336 Detect Signature RAW at 9784 Detect Signature RAW at 12232 Detect Signature RAW at 14680 Detect Signature RAW at 17128 Detect Signature RAW at 19576 Detect Signature RAW at 22024 Detect Signature RAW at 24472 Detect Signature RAW at 26920 Detect Signature RAW at 29368 Detect Signature RAW at 31816 Detect Signature RAW at 34264 Detect Signature RAW at 36712 Detect Signature RAW at 39160 Detect Signature ISO9660 START at 39184 Detect Signature RAW at 41608 Detect Signature ISO9660 END at 41632 Image offset start at 0 Sector header 16 bit Sector ECC 384 bit Block 2448 29% [:=====> :]
Each ISO took under 60-seconds to create (beefy) and 20-seconds each to pull over to my Windows box using scp. The enormous HIGH-DEF mod-pack was behind one of those throttling sites unless you pay a fee, so I'll include that on my external with the ISOs when I decide to do this again in 10-years booting from Microsoft Windows CloudTM
At any rate, the game looks FANTASTIC at 1920x1080. I can't even imagine how much work had to go into that, but it looks fresh and nothing like the 2002 it looked like when I started.
https://www.wsgf.org/dr/dungeon-siege --> For more resolutions (ex.: 3440 x 1440. Have to HEXEDIT the .EXE file)
https://www.nexusmods.com/dungeonsiege1/mods/44?tab=files --> High resolution texture pack (5.7Gib)
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Glossary:Anisotropic_filtering_(AF) --> Force anisotropic filtering
https://www.moddb.com/games/dungeon-siege/addons/dungeon-siege-high-resolution-textures <-- Skip the paywall above (Thanks Leslie!)
