Cheats-Area.com

   Better late than never, we are now being offered the first game in Sid Meier's (and Bruce Shelley's) famous steaming tycoon series, free of charge, courtesy of some 2K Games marketing guys who figured out another way to promote the new Sid Meier's Railroads! game released last month. Actually, this is the second title in the series - Railroad Tycoon Deluxe - an extended version of the original Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon that was released back in 1990, at that time by MicroProse. The deluxe edition includes additional scenarios and settings, enhanced (but still highly pixelated) graphics, and of course several additional types of trains to work with.

   The 14 MB archive can be downloaded locally, and it includes the DOS version of the game, the DOSBox v0.65 emulator, the game manual in PDF format, as well as a list of "codes", so popular back in the days when "copy-protection" used to mean opening the manual at page 5, line 3, word 12.

   For those of you who didn't get to play around with DOSBox yet, 2K Games also offers some basic advice in the included readme. Once installed, you will be able to launch the game either in full-screen, or in windowed-mode - the first one being less recommended from a technical point of view (on LCD monitors in particular it might act up), but of course it's a lot better playing the game in full-screen if you don't get any sort of problem. To change between the two display modes, the old Alt+Enter combo works wonders.

   If the game moves too slowly, or too fast, you can adjust the DOSBox emulator's speed with Ctrl+F12 (speed-up) and Ctrl+F11 (slow-down). And if you play it in windowed mode and can't get the mouse pointer out of the game's window, a simple Alt+Tab or Ctrl+F10 should do the trick.

   Now, enough theory. Go practice!