by Dipl.-Ing. Nikolaus Sbarounis
My acquaintance with the Railroad Tycoon series began as early as 1993. It was my favourite pastime during alertness shifts in the military unit where I was serving. Despite my disregard for the so-called "intellectual ownership" (and most kinds of ownership for that matter), as far as railway software is concerned, I have happened to possess legitimate copies of every program I have used. This includes all 3 editions of Railroad Tycoon. Of course I gave up Railroad Tycoon II as soon as I laid my hands on the Railroad Tycoon III since 2005.In recent years, Railroad Tycoon III has constituted one of my main reasons for maintaining a Windows boot option in my otherwise Linux-dominated computers.
Technical considerations
How many instances of Railroad Tycoon III should be installed in a single PC? The absolute minimum can be no less than 2, but preferably many more are required for serious development activity. Undoubtedly, it is vital to have one instance reserved for fail-safe tampering with the internal intricacies of the software and its accomapanying files. Moreover, the development of decent-looking localized scenarios imposes the existence of further parallel installations featuring appropriate cars and structures for the area concerned.Fortunately, a mere drag & drop of the master Railroad Tycoon III installation folder is sufficient to create additional functional instances of the program within the same PC, avoiding the whole installation-and-upgrade repetitions. More importantly, you can run the desired Railroad Tycoon III variant directly from a USB stick on any PC already that has the basic barebones Railroad Tycoon III installed in its hard disk! Any extra stuff in the USB stick "DATA" directory will be available regardless whether it is present on the hard disk or not. This spares both hard disk space and you from a lot of inconveniences and mistakes when working on parallel projects, especially when you are on the move between different PC's. Once you want to try a new combination of rolling stock and buildings, just do it on a separate USB stick and confusion will be avoided!
Comments
Post a Comment