Designed by Joe Ybarra, designer of the classic Starflight games, Alien Legacy is an excellent space strategy game with a good dose of adventure and action elements thrown in.
In the tradition of Starflight, explore and build new colonies on distant planets while researching alien technologies. The cliche plot at the start soon evolves into an interesting mix of alien espionage, mysteries, and intergalactic conflicts. A solid game (although not a classic that Starflight is) that was severely underrated and underhyped, and light-years better than the its overhyped cousin Outpost :)
Review By HOTUD
English 
Comments and reviews
Hey everyone! Alien Legacy is still my favorite game, so I’ve been working on **AL-MARS-PATCH**, an experimental Windows launcher with fixes for several longstanding bugs.
It addresses Mass Driver crashes and stalled deliveries, production countdown issues, and crew calculations. It also adds optional WASD controls and automatic coordinate notes.
https://martinlabonte.net/jeux/alien-legacy?culture=en
The game has always had a bug with the mass drivers, it is even in the game readme. There is finally a fix for it, just run this in the game folder prior to launch and it will repair the issue. It is a one time fix to the al.exe file. There is a full explanation of the error her as well. https://github.com/johnsonfarmsus/alien-legacy-alfix
How to mount the game on a drive.
If you don't have the latest version of Dosbox, search for it on the web and get it. It's free and found in many places.
After installation, open the "options" file: "Dosbox-0.74-3.conf"
I don't change anything except this line:
cycles=40000.
40000 cycles is fast enough for good gameplay, but not so fast that working in your colonies has problems.
Close the file.
1) download the game; extract the folder with the game; move the game to the desired drive (e.g. d:\al). I changed the folder name to "al" to make it easy to type in Dosbox.
1) Open doxbox command line.
2) Type "mount d d:\al" (enter)
3) Type "d:" (enter)
4) Type "al" (enter)
game begins to run in dosbox.
I downloaded the iso for Alien Legacy. I own the original cd, but my PC does not have a drive for cd or dvd. I tried to mount the iso file to run the install.bat, but dosbox
did not like pointing to my f drive.
Cannot run the bat as the installer is 16 bit. Thanks for any
This is a classic game that should NEVER be remade, maybe a facelift but only if it is in the same atmosphere and spirit as the old game! leave EVERYTHING else including voice acting and music in tact! I hope Gog doesn't get it and try and "censor" out all the good parts. PC crowd stinks!
You can download the CD version from archive.org.
https://archive.org/details/alien-legacy
Someone should make an app out this game. -any coders want to take this job on and I can finance it
Two things:
First, I fond a manual. Not dificult, just search in Google. http://www.sierragamers.com/uploads/24082/The_Games/Alien_Legacy_Disk_Manual.pdf
Second: If someone is interested, theres a page in the Wishlist of GOG to make a remake or something. Vote up! http://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/alien_legacy
I LOVE this game!
And YES. Need a remake. Too cool to ignore it.
Yes DOS box will allow you to mount a drive
actually its called a virtual drive you can have lots of drives mounted simultaneously at once even
Got this game among a pack of DOS games and it has literally blown me away. I just wanted to stop in and say that it is a great game and it was certainly ahead of its time.
Later in the game, when you develop the mass driver, do NOT use them to send ore to the space station around the world with aliens. This game has a bug in it that will cause the game to crash permanently if you do that.
Another bug: sometimes if you start your second colony on Gaia too early in the game, it will cause some kind of problem and the colony will mysteriously move to another location on the planet, and other problems seem to start because of it. Just wait until you discover the "colony-location detector" (can't remember the name), then there won't be a problem.
Another bug: the game seems to have a limited number of memory allocations for colonies. If you build too many of them, it will cause a permanent crash situation and it will be difficult to recover unless you have a saved game that you can go back to; but even then I've had situations when even that didn't help. Going over "the limit" probably causes some data to be overwritten. Some coder did some poor work there.
Another bug:
Oh, and for reference--a cycle rate of 5000-10000 seems to work pretty well. Below 10k and planet exploration feels a little painful, but if you go too much above that, the game will advance too quickly even on speed 1.
For anyone wondering--this is the disk version, not the CD version. What's the difference? Better cinematics and better music in the disk version! Hooray! Back in its day, some of this stuff (like the solar system view) seemed downright haunting.
Please no! GOG.com (even though I do support them in some ways) are destroying the abandonware scene. Let's not tempt them into just taking it upon themselves to start selling this one for $9.99, just "out of thin air", like they have with say Master of Orion 1.
Once GOG get their claws them, these all vanish from these free sites!
Going through the games in order, this one is far the best one on this site so far. Probably will remain so even as I go much further into the alphabet!
I remember downloading this off Abandonia 3 years back and I had a permenent crash situation develop about mid-game which stopped me continuing (after a good 3-weeks play too).... hope it doesn't happen this time!
" Deerrunner Dosbox will allow you to mount a cd drive
I agree Soulless, let's get a remake for Windows. :-}
A legend!
3. part of outpost series i think it was
still could not end it ...
Time for a Remake too!
I am always looking to find a copy of this that can be run on Windows, v-7 now, 64 bit. I got ahold of a CD, and it will not work with the new SW, OS.
I already asked at GOG.com, and they keep telling me they can not discuss the future plans.
I need Dos.Box that will also run the CD drive.
One of the best games ever played :)
Shame they don't make ones like this anymore ...
Great game, now I want to download please :p
Really? So Alien Legacy has great graphics, eh? 30k cycles is too fast? I've played this game hundreds of times and know whereof I speak. Maybe you should engage your brain before opening your mouth.
Ignore those useless comments by the "beenthere" guy. Maybe he should playing lame current-gen games off Steam if he thinks this game has bad graphics or needs some stupid remake. Certain people don't belong on sites like this.
Also, setting your cpu cycles to 30,000 for every game in DOSBox is flat out retarded. Doing so would make a countless amount of games run too fast - in turn screwing up audio sync, animations and worse. Cycles should be either set to Auto or per-game depending on its requirements.
This game is old, the graphics are clunky and even laughable by today's standards, but the gameplay is great. It is just begging for some game company to take the ideas of this game and update it for modern-style gaming. Who will take up this challenge?
Don't forget (when using Dosbox) to press Control-F12 until you see it increase to at least 30,000 cycles at the top of the emulator screen. Otherwise, the game (and all other games that use dosbox) will be excruciatingly SLOW.
No comment nor review for this game at the moment.