Did you get the new Steam controller before it was sold out? Lucky dog! So did I, though. And immediately I tried to play Final Fantasy 11 with it and found it that didn’t work. Right now, it’s not possible to properly use the Steam controller outside Steam. You’ll have to add the game to Steam as a non-Steam game, and then it works. But what about games that don’t work properly with Steam, like Final Fantasy 11? Luckily, people who are much smarter than me already figured out a way.
Update 24-5-26: Right now I recommend PadForge, which seems to be getting regular updates.
You need to have Steam closed.
The controller will work like any controller you want (including Xbox 360 and PS4), and you can map the back pedals to something too (like keyboard keys, for example).
Not recommended:
SISR – Causes games to perform horrible (I’m guessing due to the aggressive overlay). Noticed this in Pathfinder WotR.
SteamlessController – Vibecoded, latest firmware broke the app.
DirectXInput – Has a tenancy to crash. Not ideal to lose connection in the middle of a game.
Final Fantasy XI is old. It was released in 2002 on the PlayStation 2. While it had a lot of content added, it’s a very clunky experience in this day and age, especially compared to Final Fantasy XIV.
There are ways to make it a better experience, though.
The servers for this game are in Japan, which meant I was disconnecting at least once an hour. After I turned on a VPN to Japan (and set it to only use it for Final Fantasy 11), I haven’t had a single disconnect. Personally I’m using Proton VPN.
Next is installing a modern launcher, such as Windower or Ashita. I’m going to focus on the former, since I found it easier to work with.
If you enable Config in Windower, you can set some pretty good graphical changes once you’re in-game:
//config ClippingPlane 10 //config FrameRateDivisor 1 //config save
ClippingPlane sets the draw distance (1 is the game maximum, so 10 times that), FrameRateDivisor sets the fps to 60 (instead of 30) and save… well saves it.
Do yourself a favor and go to Config -> Misc 3 and enable Timer Display for Status Icons. It’ll show you how long a (de)buff will last.
Windower allows you to install add-ons and plug-ins. However, there are many more add-ons that aren’t in the master list. And some of those are pretty damn good.
XIPivot allows you to load modified DAT files. This means that you can alter the game files without actually touching the original files. Combine this with HD textures (AshenbubsHD) and HD maps (Remapster) and you’ll have a much better looking game than you’d otherwise get. Especially the high-quality maps are amazing, because the original ones are just very low resolution and not the easiest to read.
Balloon puts chat balloons on your screen when characters talk, same as Final Fantasy XIV does. Otherwise, you’ll be reading the story through a chat window at the bottom. This is far from ideal.
Fuckoff stops the MTG shout messages in main chat.
Mappy is an external application that hooks up to your game and loads a map in a window outside of the game. If you use the maps from Remapster (the ones called Map Pack 1 (Mappy)), you’ll have a nice high-res map (most of the time) that you can zoom and drag around, making it much easier to look stuff up on the fly.
The application is very finicky though and is prone to crashing (or making the game crash!) if you do it in the wrong order. First load Mappy, then load the game and log in with your character so it’s fully loaded, then from the drop-down menu select your instance and it should work.
Both Steam and GOG offer the third FMV-game of Tex Murphy, but upon booting it turns out it doesn’t work very well in Windows 11. There are solutions offered on both the Steam and GOG forum, by installing ffdshow (that makes the videos work) and VirtualMidiSynth, but I never managed to get the sound working after troubleshooting for about 2 hours.
Luckily I had an old laptop I got last year, for the sole purpose of running Windows XP and games that wouldn’t work properly, such as Black & White. The GOG installer works fine under Windows XP, but the game would crash upon launching.
This is where my new plan came into view: installing the game using 86Box, which will run a virtual machine with Windows 98. Even that was a bit of a gamble, because Overseer is a Windows 95 game. After quite some effort, which was mostly due to finding old software (links from webpages long dead or not updated since the 2000s). I doubt I’m the only one who had a lot of trouble getting Tex Murphy: Overseer to work under Windows 11, so I’ve decided to write this guide.
A warning: it still doesn’t run perfect. It slows down sometimes, the audio can crackle and some textures don’t work properly. It’s not a great experience, but at least it’s a working game.
It’s not for those who aren’t tech savvy (or patient enough to learn as you go). I’ve included premade VMs you should be able to launch, but I haven’t tested this on anything other than my own computer.
With the package I made, you don’t need to download anything else, except for the game (but there’s a torrent included, and I’ll link to it in a moment). I suggest you download the latest stable version of 86Box and the roms, but it’s not required. This package includes 86Box b8200 and the 5.3 roms.
What else is in the package?
Torrent for the game (both CD and DVD version, but we’ll be using the DVD version, it’s what creates this whole mess after all).
86Box + roms.
Windows 98 ISO + boot floppy.
Windows 98 tools:
Overseer Update 1.04
DirectX 8.0a
Voodoo 3 drivers
DVD Express
Elecard MPEG Decoder 2.0
DirectX 9.0c (optional)
K-lite codec pack (optional)
Virtual machines with both a fresh Windows 98 install (with drivers + DirectX 8.0a) and with Overseer installed. These are in case you don’t want to mess around with this yourself, although I haven’t tested this and it might break with future 86Box updates. It should work with the included version though.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned to hate during my quest to getting this to work, is outdated or dead links. That’s why I’m giving you a few mirrors for the package, so this will hopefully stay up for a long time:
You also need to grab the Overseer DVD. Because the game is still sold on Steam and GOG, I’m not going to directly host it myself, but you can find it on Archive.org. There is also a torrent in the package.
The reason you want the DVD is because of the FMV cutscenes. The CD version has scanlines and they run at 15 fps, on the DVD they are in much better quality and run at 30 fps. And you won’t need to swap the discs, which is just more convenient.
Alright, let’s get started!
Installing 86Box and installing Windows 98
Follow this guide (mirror). It’ll show you how to install 86Box and set up the VM. It uses a slightly older version of 86Box, but the differences are minimal. Instead of a CD-rom drive, you want to set up a 48x TOSHIBA DVD-ROM SD-M1802 1051 (ATAPI). I found the game runs slightly better with a 333 MHz processor and 128MB of RAM.
The boot disk and Windows 98 ISO are included in my package, so you don’t need to grab those again. You can find DirectX and the Voodoo drivers in my package as well. It’s possible to directly mount a folder into 86Box, so you can easily set this up.
You’ll end up with a fresh Windows 98 install with the necessary drivers. In the package there’s also a VM with a fresh Windows 98 install if you don’t want to do this part yourself.
Installing Overseer and black magic to get it working
This is where the magic is going to happen. Hopefully.
Mount the Overseer DVD in 86Box and install Overseer. It’s a small install, because it’ll read all the files from the DVD while playing.
Mount the folder with the package. Install the 1.04 update (either copy the files over yourself or run update.exe).
Install DVD Express. This was a bitch to find, and only thanks to the Wayback Machine was I able to find it here. Ofcourse, it’s already in the package so you don’t need to jump through hoops.
Install Elecard MPEG Decoder 2.0 (empgdec20).
Mount the Overseer DVD again. Launch the game. The intro won’t play. In the options menu, under MPEG II Device, select Mediamatics DVD Express. Go back to the main menu. Hit that “intro” button and now it should all work.
I suggest setting your video mode to 800×600 and enable hardware rendering and all the benefits. Make that virtual Voodoo 3000 work. While the game slows down (especially when opening menus), it doesn’t seem to matter if you use a very high or low resolution, trilinear filtering and low or high detailed textures. So go nuts.
When you’re done playing, make sure to exit the game, shutdown Windows 98, and only turn off 86Box when it shows “it’s now safe to turn off your computer”. This is not a joke, Windows was a fickle wench and hard drives didn’t like sudden shutdowns.
And there you have it. With a bit of work, you should now having a working copy of Tex Murphy: Overseer.
