TOMB RAIDER IN GLORIOUS TECHNICOLOR
Copyright 2001 www.tombraiderchronicles.com, All Rights Reserved

[ December 11th 2001 ]

Here at last, the long-awaited, high-quality graphics patch for the classic original Tomb Raider game. But is it from Core or Eidos? No! A lone developer, Paul Gardiner, has gotten fed up of waiting for an official patch, and has pioneered some new DOS/Windows communication software which allows Tomb Raider to make use of modern graphics cards.

In fact, the system, known as Glidos, is more than a patch for Tomb Raider. It can potentially provide high-quality graphics support for many Glide-based DOS games. Tomb Raider was apparently the target game used in the development of Glidos, and so support for Tomb Raider is near to flawless. It also works for the Unfinished Business levels.

So what is the problem with Tomb Raider, anyway? The first of the Tomb Raider games was developed at a time when 3D graphics cards had only just made it to the PC market. Now there are several standards for writing 3D games, the main ones being DirectX and OpenGL, but back then each graphics card had to be driven in its own special way. Tomb Raider, being from that era, was written to drive the graphics cards that were around at that time; things have moved on, and modern cards are completely different.

Luckily, there was one graphics standard (known as Glide) around in those early days, and there is a version of Tomb Raider that uses Glide. Glide support in graphics card has mostly died out, but it is Glide that Glidos supports, and hence the mechanism by which we now can have high-quality graphics from this classic game.

The quality from Glidos is quite stunning. Of course, you shouldn't expect a game from that era to compete in graphics detail with a game like Half-Life say, but we were amazed by the detail that was visible, and that we had never noticed before. Certainly it compares well with Tomb Raider II. And compared with the software graphics that you get from Tomb Raider without Glidos - well its a different game all together.

Don't just take our word for it: grab a copy from our download site. If you have never played the first of the Tomb Raider games, then you are in for a real treat. Many consider it still the best of the episodes. And if you have played it before, its very much worth revisiting with the high-resolution graphics provided by Glidos; it wont have looked this good when you first played it, we promise you.

You will need a copy of the original game. It can be obtained for around £5 or so from most high street games stores. If you already have the original game, then you need only download Glidos, and that's free...

Click HERE for more information, exclusive interviews and the latest media on GLIDOS.