These are two really good games from legendary assembler programmer Chris Sawyer, which were huge hits when they came out and have only gotten better over time. I especially enjoyed playing Rollercoaster Tycoon 1 with the two expansions, “Added Attractions” and “Loopy Landscapes,” over and over again. Simply a timeless classic.
However, the technical side, or more precisely the resolutions, had long been a problem: the game only natively supports 4:3 resolutions, which have long since fallen out of use. There were hacks to get around this: Using a hex editor, it was possible to make at least 720p playable in 16:9 format. None of this was ideal. With Windows 11, full-screen mode no longer works at all, making it a hopeless case.
OpenRCT2
This is where OpenRCT2 comes in: an open source implementation of Rollercoaster Tycoon 2.
RCT2 builds seamlessly on RCT1 and has been improved and expanded in many areas without losing any of its charm (unlike RCT3, which came later). It’s best to have the original game handy, as the experience is only really good with the original game data.
Thanks to this community project, RCT2 is up and running again, with many modern features and support for modern systems and hardware. I highly recommend that every fan of the series take a look at the project.
The system requirements are:
Windows 7 or newer
macOS 10.13 (High Sierra) or newer
Linux is more complex: Ubuntu 18.04 or higher, Arch, in principle many distributions should run
FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD
…so the whole thing even runs natively on macOS and Linux!
OpenTTD
Just like OpenRCT2, OpenTTD is a community-developed reimplementation of the classic Transport Tycoon Deluxe, which was released in the 90s and is also an absolute classic.
Here, too, many features have been expanded and improved, and TTD now runs flawlessly on modern systems. You should also have the original game data at hand here. Click here for the project, and here for some impressions. The multiplayer mode is also actively used, and there are many servers!
It is also important to know where to copy which original game files.
The system requirements are very minimal:
OpenTTD should run on absolutely any computer with a standard operating system!