Tweaking Bullfrog’s Theme Hospital

Update 18 Oct 2020: I have removed the oldpcgames dot com link mentioned in the previous update. Nevertheless, a fabulously working version of Theme Hospital is still available for download online, FREE.

Update: If you’re looking to download all your favourite Bullfrog games, head over to Old School PC Games (broken link removed, site non-existent).

Amongst all the Bullfrog games I’ve ever played, nothing can compare to the enjoyable Theme Hospital. I recently had the urge to play it again after I completed the whole Cake Mania 2 game, but noticed that the game was sluggish. Even after using the recommended DOS game emulator DOSBox, it still didn’t fix my issue. So I scoured the Web as usual and found three useful sites:

1. At the Ubuntu Forums, they were discussing how to speed up DOSBox by modifying its cycles so that graphics from a game could render faster. This is the most recommended technique I found if your DOS game like Theme Hospital runs very slow. A detailed explanation on how to change the cycles can also be found in this site.
2. The Vogons Forum also discussed the same thing about how to edit the DOSBox cycles, and the members also recommended editing the core setting in the configuration file to dynamic, since it may have something to do with the computer processor.
3. You may want to download the files in the Theme Hospital Downloads site (broken link removed, site non-existent), especially the Theme Hospital Patch file, as it may help repair any faults in the original game which could cause the slowdown in your game.

To be honest, after trying all the techniques from those site, it still didn’t solve my problem. For some unknown reason, I decided to download the game again from Best Old Games, and — what do you know? — the game ran as smooth as melted chocolate! And I didn’t even have to use DOSBox!

Update 18 Oct 2020: I haven’t tried downloading from Best Old Games in a long while, so please do so with caution if you decide to try. Otherwise, as mentioned on the top of this post, a Theme Hospital download for Windows 10 is available.

I still have a problem with the sound, though. I can hear squat, so there’s none of those funny sound effects and music background, but I can live without it for now. I’ll post something up if I ever do find a solution to this problem.

Check out my other posts: « Cool visual trickery / Trying very hard to blog »

Posted on 3 July, 2008 under Web traversing and tagged with best old games, bullfrog games, dos, oldgames, pcgames, theme hospital