Posted: 25 days ago
(Edited: 23 days ago)
Emil_Borg
He/Him
Player (110)
Joined: 1/6/2022
Posts: 29
Hello everyone! I was looking at the community effort of porting Lego Island to multiple platforms as seen here yesterday when I noticed that they have ported it DOS, or in other words, completely removed Windows 95 from the equation, so to speak. So, out of curiosity, I decided to try it out in BizHawk and it's DOS emulator. So far, I have not gotten it to boot. I can copy the required files from the official Lego Island CD-ROM to the hard drive. I even copied the DOS port alongside cwsdpmi.exe to the hard drive because you to run "cwsdpmi -x" before launching the game. But alas, no dice. Which brings me here. Can somebody please help me? I'm at a loss on what to do.
Posted: 25 days ago
Randomno
Editor, Experienced player (600)
Joined: 2/11/2018
Posts: 286
Flash TASer of 2023 N64/DS TASer of 2021
Non-answer: Why not run the original game in Windows 95 in BizHawk instead?
Posted: 25 days ago
Emil_Borg
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Player (110)
Joined: 1/6/2022
Posts: 29
Randomno wrote:
Non-answer: Why not run the original game in Windows 95 in BizHawk instead?
It's purely for testing purposes first and foremost.
Posted: 24 days ago
Emil_Borg
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Player (110)
Joined: 1/6/2022
Posts: 29
But if I am completely honest, it's more to do with the fact that I keep hitting out of memory problems in BizHawk that I am sure is caused by my current laptop only having 8 GB of ram, so I can't TAS Lego Island on Windows 95 within BizHawk.
Posted: 23 days ago
(Edited: 23 days ago)
Emil_Borg
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Player (110)
Joined: 1/6/2022
Posts: 29
After much trial and error, I managed to get the DOS port of Lego Island to boot on DosBoxPure. It involved moving the contents from the Lego folders from a official Lego Island CD and merging them together in a ISO made in ISO Maker. I think I have figured out the problem in BizHawk. Using xcopy to move files and folders from the offical Lego Island CD to the hard drive, it seems that many of the folders changes names to all caps. For example, a folder named Act2 on the CD gets renamed to ACT2 on the hard drive, so the DOS port doesn't see it. I've tried using the MOVE command to rename the folders, but it doesn't seem to work.
Posted: 23 days ago
(Edited: 23 days ago)
Emil_Borg
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Player (110)
Joined: 1/6/2022
Posts: 29
SUCCESS!!! All I needed to do was to rename SCRIPTS to Scripts and it boots in BizHawk! Link to video EDIT: the movie file is here.
Posted: 21 days ago
ShgofcTAS
They/Them
Reviewer, Active player (281)
Location: Gensokyo
Joined: 8/14/2025
Posts: 108
Location: Gensokyo
Emil_Borg wrote:
SUCCESS!!! All I needed to do was to rename SCRIPTS to Scripts and it boots in BizHawk! Link to video EDIT: the movie file is here.
MattKC approves
i like lion king.. and kirby 👍
Posted: 21 days ago
Post subject: actually contributing to the discussion now :p
ShgofcTAS
They/Them
Reviewer, Active player (281)
Location: Gensokyo
Joined: 8/14/2025
Posts: 108
Location: Gensokyo
Emil_Borg wrote:
Hello everyone! I was looking at the community effort of porting Lego Island to multiple platforms as seen here yesterday when I noticed that they have ported it DOS, or in other words, completely removed Windows 95 from the equation, so to speak. So, out of curiosity, I decided to try it out in BizHawk and it's DOS emulator. So far, I have not gotten it to boot. I can copy the required files from the official Lego Island CD-ROM to the hard drive. I even copied the DOS port alongside cwsdpmi.exe to the hard drive because you to run "cwsdpmi -x" before launching the game. But alas, no dice. Which brings me here. Can somebody please help me? I'm at a loss on what to do.
i was looking at isle portable too, though my thought was using the the linux version with libTAS because at least when i tried, BizHawk's DOS is too unreliable (or i simply do not have the right machine :p). as Dimon said, we could be running the OG game using a kinda complicated setup to get Win9x on BizHawk, but as we are dealing with waterboxed emulation, rather than sandboxed virtualization, performance will be horrendous, specially on lower end machines. im also unsure if the game's FPS should (or could under TASVideos rules) be limited to 30 because any more than that gets the turn speed much faster than it should be but it doesn't affect gameplay (other than making turns 300x harder) do idk :p (though the game itself is capped at 100FPS, also thinking if we should use THAT then)
i like lion king.. and kirby 👍
Posted: 16 days ago
Stockiel
Player (176)
Location: Daten City
Joined: 11/11/2025
Posts: 41
Location: Daten City
Glad to see people already testing out isle-portable through TAS tools and emulators! Was planning too myself but I didn't have time to, mainly due to personal things, along with me getting into Tomodachi Life. But yeah, hope some new developments come over the next few days!
Don't talk to me until I've had my god damn sugar. Amateur TASer
Posted: 13 days ago
Emil_Borg
He/Him
Player (110)
Joined: 1/6/2022
Posts: 29
I've experimented with the settings in the ISLE.ini file and found that the following settings makes it as close as possible to how the game looks in it's original release: 

[isle]
diskpath                       = "C:/FILES"
cdpath                         = "C:/FILES"
mediapath                      = "C:/FILES"
savepath                       = "C:"
flip surfaces                  = "true"
full screen                    = "true"
exclusive full screen          = "false"
wide view angle                = "true"
3dsound                        = "true"
music                          = "true"
usejoystick                    = "true"
cursor sensitivity             = "4.000000"
back buffers in video ram      = "true"
island quality                 = "2"
island texture                 = "1"
max lod                        = "3.500000"
max allowed extras             = "20"
transition type                = "3"
touch scheme                   = "2"
haptic                         = "true"
wasd                           = "false"
horizontal resolution          = "640"
vertical resolution            = "480"
exclusive x resolution         = "640"
exclusive y resolution         = "480"
exclusive framerate            = "60"
frame delta                    = "10"
msaa                           = "1"
anisotropic                    = "1"
lighting model                 = "0"
active in background           = "false"


[extensions]
texture loader                 = "false"
si loader                      = "false"
third person camera            = "false"
multiplayer                    = "false"
And in case you're wondering, yes, it does sync with movie file I shared earlier.