Running Outcast has been problematic ever since the game came out. Personally I’ve never complained about that. The thing is, I probably wouldn’t have played this wonderful game if it wasn’t for it’s bugginess. How come? Well, a friend of mine bought Outcast and after a month of futile efforts he finally gave up trying to install it and he gave it to me 
I was able to play it without any problems and for the next few days and night I was absorbed in a remarkable world, I was the hero of a great adventure…
But I digress.
Outcast was buggy, there is no doubt about it and changes in hardware and software made matters even worse. At some point certain version of OC would simply delete itself after installation. Several patches were released that fixed the installation problems but some gameplay issues remained and after the bankruptcy of Appeal there was no one to fix them.
Don’t worry though, since the release of Outcast I have personally installed and ran it on most Windows versions (at least on Win98, Win2000, WinXP and Win7) and I am here to tell you that it’s absolutely possible. In addition the problems have actually decreased on the newest OS versions (like XP and win7) – installing shouldn’t be a problem anymore and even if it is the patches will take care of that. The main problem that seem to remain are two bugs: twonha riding and extreme slowdown when going through the mud in Shamazaar.
OK, enough babbling. Here is what you have to do.
Installation
As I said I haven’t had problems with installation since WinXP. If you do experience such problems you need Patch 1. This patch is used to install the game. If the Outcast CD1 is in your drive, first remove it, then start up the patch application and finally put the CD back in.
Patch 2
I’ve never needed Patch 2 to be honest. I even think it’s obsolete since Patch 3 seems to fix the same problems and some more. I am including it here just in case.
Patch 3
I highly recommend applying Patch 3 because it fixes some common bugs and is essential if you want to use the “Best Solution” to the “twonha” and the “mud” bugs described below. This patch is applied after installation.
Important note: This patch is multi-language. When you fire it up you’ll be presented with language choice menu. Make sure you choose the language of your Outcast-version! There are slight differences between versions and if you pick the wrong language the patch won’t be applied correctly and the game won’t run!
DVD Patch
If you own the DVD version of OC you should get the DVD-Patch. I don’t have DVD version myself so I can’t say much about how to use it…and the instructions are in French According to the translation by google thought, you should apply the patch after installation.
Fixing the Twonha riding and Mud-slowdown bugs
Those two bugs are the main complaint that people seem to have these days – Twonha doesn’t move when you mount it and Cutter walks veeeery slowly through the mud in Shamazaar. There are three ways to fix these as far as I know.
The Best Solution
Hopefully you won’t need to try the other two solutions below. This one is the best solution, hands down.
You need to have Outcast installed (it shouldn’t matter whether you used Patch 1 or not. I didn’t.) and patched with Patch 3.
Next you’ll apply an unofficial Patch – get it here, then start it up and locate the OC3.exe file (should be in your …outcast/oc folder) and let the patch do its work. Again, you need to have applied Patch 3 before using the unofficial patch or you’ll get an error!
Once the patch have been successfully applied you’re done – twonha and mud should now behave normally.
NOTE: The unofficial patch was created by “terence_13“. He appeared unexpectedly on the planet-adelpha forums and later on the open outcast boards and said that the release of the Openoutcast-Demo Oasis has inspired him to sit down and try to find the cause of these two bug. And find them he did. If you experience any problems with the patch you should read this thread on the planet-adelpha forum.
Slowing down your system
(Note: You do not need this or any of the ideas further down if the “Best Solution” has worked for you!)
This is a solution that has been available for quite some time now. Basically the two bugs are somehow connected with the speed of newer CPUs or more precisely with the higher frame-rate they produce. Don’t ask me how and why – I have no idea, but some smart people figured out that if you slow down your system these bugs would disappear. There are different ways to achieve this kind of artificial slowdown (e.g. starting several heavy applications) but the most “elegant” way seems to be using a CPU slowdown application like CPU Grabber, CPU Killer etc. I had better results with the former but I recommend you try both or even something else and see which works best for you. (I suspect that CPU Killer isn’t free BTW…)
Until a couple of years ago this used to be a fairly simple solution – you just had to start up the slowdown application, tell it how much load to put on your CPU and then start Outcast. If the bugs were still there you go back to your desktop (alt+tab) and slow down your system some more, then return to Outcast and test again. If the bugs are gone but the game is getting too slow you try a slightly lower value for the slowdown app and so on. Through some trial and error you should be able to find the right value.
However with multicore CPUs nowadays it’s a bit trickier. You have to do it as explained in this article
-start your slowdown app (e.g. CPU Grabber) as administrator – right-click on it and choose “Run as administrator”
-open up Task Manager (ctrl+shift+esc), under Processes find the slowdown application, right-click on it and choose “Set Affinity…”. Then set the affinity for that process to just one CPU core. It doesn’t matter which one but remember it since it will be important in the next step
-start Outcast as administrator. Once the actual game is running go back to Task Manager(alt+tab), find the process called OC3.exe and again set its affinity to the same CPU core you chose in the previous step.
-return to game and see if the bugs are gone. Do some trial and error as described above until you get good game-speed with no bugs.
-have fun
Run a screen capturing software and set FPS to 30
That’s a weird and not very practical solution but I decided to include it because of a funny coincidence. Just as I was writing this I stumbled upon a youtube video of a guy making a “speedrun” on Outcast (a speedrun is the art of going through a game as quickly as possible without cheating by planing your route, using glitches and bugs to your advantage, skipping all “unessential” quests, movie sequences etc.). In the comments to that video the same guy explains that recording with FRAPS at 30 frames has solved the slowdown issues.
EDIT: seems like FPS would depend on your version of Outcast. For more info read the very first comment by AWE just below this blog post.
I hope this article has been helpful. One last tip in case you still have some problems is playing around with the compitabiliy mode of the executable files, especially OC1.exe, OC2.exe and OC3.exe. Persoanally that never helped me much but a lot of people recommend it so I guess it’s worth a try.
Resources:
Patch1 Patch2 Patch3 DVD-Patch
Unofficial Patch
More info about the unofficial patch
CPU Grabber
Another article on running Outcast
