When is Mastertronic Thief Collection Out?

[Sharkspine]

Hello

I realise this isn't Steam specific but people on here are normally very informative (a bit of Steamy snobbery there!)

I read a 5 star (naturally :))review in PC Gamers July Edition of Mastertronics Thief: The Complete Collection. They have tweaked all of them so that they worked fine with Vista. However i can't see it for sale online or in any shops (UK)!

On Mastertronics website they say its unavailable (?!)

Is this a journo prematurely wetting my appetite? Can anybody shed some light?

P.S By the way I bought Mastertronics edition of Theme Hospital which is apparently Vista compatible. Trouble is it's 32bit not 64bit. I did get it working however. I just hope Thief is 64bit compatible too straight out the box.

[neuromancer]

Wow, I had no idea this (http://www.mastertronic.com/productMastertronic.asp?pid=823&productLabelID=2) existed. I'd love to see it on Steam, much simpler than doing all the required tweaks manually.

[SvZurich]

With shipping to the US, that Mastertronics version of all 3 games is $20.40 now. Very tempting.

[FetusZero]

Indeed, very tempting, but I'd rather see it pop out on Steam one day, as it's a big hassle getting them to work with Win7 64bit.

[U977]

It doesn't work without tweaking on most XP/Vista configs, actually. But with tweaking, it works.

The good thing with the Mastertronics edition is that the included Thief "1" is the Gold version, which is even better than the Dark Project, and not especially easy to find.

[AXidenT]

Wow, I had no idea this (http://www.mastertronic.com/productMastertronic.asp?pid=823&productLabelID=2) existed. I'd love to see it on Steam, much simpler than doing all the required tweaks manually.

Agreed, though I sort of doubt we'll be seeing it here... Maybe for Thief 4...

[slayerking]

It doesn't work without tweaking on most XP/Vista configs, actually. But with tweaking, it works.

The good thing with the Mastertronics edition is that the included Thief "1" is the Gold version, which is even better than the Dark Project, and not especially easy to find.

Yeah you still need to apply patches like dual core or DDFIX, The only updated thing in these ones is an updated installer and Thief Gold and Thief Deadly shadows no longer need a disc in the drive but for some odd reason Thief 2 still does.

[SvZurich]

Just got my copy of the Mastertronics version in. Totally forgot about it for a few months. Looking forward to trying it out this weekend.

[lpipkin]

doesn't one of the thief version not work anymore with modern video cards it has something to do with texture no longer supported kinda like the crimson skies bug where you can't see the text with current video cards.

[seq]

I found a Thief collection on a web shop here in Sweden, that went for $15/10£/12€, so I went ahead and ordered it. And it actually turned out to be the Mastertronic edition. I installed all three games on my Win7 x64 setup just now.

Thief 2 and 3 worked out of the box (Thief 2 was the only one of the three that required the DVD to run). I couldn't get Thief 1 to run though, it locked up as soon as I started the training. With desktop composition disabled (I have three monitors connected to my computer, which Windows can't handle sometimes when launching certain games) I got to see the first screen of the training, but it locked up quite hastily after that. But I'll have to run DDFix in any case, to get widescreen support and all that, so I'm guessing that it should work after that. I just don't have time to get into all that right now though. I've only dabbled with those fixes for System Shock 2, never for the Thief games.

If anyone wants me to report further regarding the Mastertronic edition, let me know.

[Paarma]

Could it be due to the multi-core crash problem? Dark engine has issues with multi-core processors so you should only use one core when playing the games. But as you said, the Thief 2 worked fine so it'd be strange that both wouldn't work. :1

[SvZurich]

Thief 1 locks due to the multicore issue. This is easily worked around. Start Thief 1 and get into the game. Bring up the task manager and select the Thief process. Right clock and set the affinity to only one core. For my quad core AMD I just give it the lesser used 4th core and it works great.