Dungeon Keeper is a real-time strategy game in which you are on the side of evil, contrary to the usual way, and fight against the good. The partly quite dark humor and the creative implementation of the game make it a popular classic. I strongly recommend to play at least the first 3-5 missions of the single player in this game (doesn't take that long, 2 h at worst). First because only then you learn to really appreciate the game and second because you can get used to it so much better than when you have to ask 50,000 questions on LAN because you don't know all the tricks and dependencies. There is also a very good Wiki to DK.

The game is available at GOG, including the expansion Deeper Dungeons. 5,50 € is not much for it. The GOG version should also run on Win 10. Apart from that you can also buy it at Ebay or other retailers.

Simply installing as usual from the CD should suffice. The game is playable up to XP.

The game is also manually crackable. I. e., you don't need any additional files to play the game without a CD. To do this, proceed as follows:

1. You copy the directories Levels and Ldata from the folder Keeper of the CD into the installation directory and
2. change the line INSTALL_PATH= in the file keeper.cfg so that it contains the installation directory instead of the CD.

From now on DK no longer asks for the CD because it searches and finds its requirements on the hard disk.

The game can no longer be played under Vista or newer Windows with on-board resources. But there is KeeperFX. This tool has many nice features. You can change the resolution of the game, you can change the language and apparently there is also a TCP connection implemented for the network game. But it still requires the original data. So no KeeperFX without the original game. All you have to do is unpack their archive, use the launcher in it and specify the directory KEEPER on the CD. And you can play DK again.

The alternative is to install into DOSBox. As the game was written for DOS, it runs well on DOSBox. With active IPX setting you can even play a network game online, provided all participants are connected to the same IPX server.

Under Linux DK can be played at least with KeeperFX under Wine. It is necessary to adjust the resolution accordingly and start it in window mode via the launcher. But then it works surprisingly well (Tested under Ubuntu 14.04 x64 with Wine 1.7.55). The frame rates look a bit worse. Especially if you increase the frame drop with CTRL + + or CTRL + -, the game is noticeably slower than it would be on the same computer under Windows.

Here also DOSBox could come in handy.

The game requires IPX. However, the original *.exe file cannot be used to create an IPX network game. You can fix this with the IPX patch. Just replace the installed *.exe file with the one from the archive. You can play DK in your network, now. This also works with DOSBox. With KeeperFX it is also possible to play the game over a TCP connection and also in Coop under Windows. This is however (at least in version 0.4.6.1670) still very buggy. Although the actual game starts and you can usually also play for quite some time however, the game crashes reliably as soon as one PC opponent was defeated. Sometimes this happens also rather randomly.

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