Today I installed another great game bought from GoG: Stronghold! The development team just released a “brand new” HD version from this 2001 castle RTS and it’s AWESOME.

The original Stronghold, which you also get from GoG for free if you buy Stronghold HD, is limited to a 1024×768 resolution and it is a pain to play it on an actual 1920×1080 display…with Stronghold HD you finally get the full experience!

Unfortunately neither of these 2 versions are playable on a 500 MHz K6-2…even the standard version runs slowly. The original recommended spec for the game in 2001 was a 550 MHz or faster CPU.

Recently I bought Dungeon Keeper 2 from Good Old Games as it’s only around 6$ and I remembered it as a fabulous game. GoG are really awesome people which have ported older games so they run on current OS and it’s completely DRM free. After buying the game you get a simple .exe download without any heavy Steam-like client.

So, why am I telling you this? Well just to let you know the port doesn’t run well at all on a 500 MHz K6-2 system with a GeForce 3 (it ran fine back in 1999) :(

It all has to do with some changes made by GoG to the 3D engine…if you look at the installation folders you’ll have 2 executables.

• DKII.exe : this executable runs “sort of fine” on the K6-2 but the experience isn’t that great and it will eventually lag when the missions become more complex and more enemies are displayed. This is NOT the default .exe run from the shortcut the installer creates
• DKII-DX.exe : this is the executable modified even more by GoG to make it stable on modern Windows, it’s just unplayable on an old computer…just forget it

So unfortunately to get your Dungeon Keeper 2 fix on an older machine from the 500 MHz class with todays updates + drivers + DirectX, the GoG version isn’t good. It runs absolutely fine on any modern PC though!