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Blade Runner

From PCGamingWiki, the wiki about fixing PC games

This page is for the original version. For the enhanced edition, see Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition.

Blade Runner
Blade Runner cover
Developers
Westwood Studios
Publishers
Retail (original) Virgin Interactive
Retail (re-releases) Electronic Arts
Digital Alcon Interactive Group
Engines
Original Blade
Digital ScummVM
Release dates
Windows November 14, 1997
Windows (ScummVM) December 17, 2019[1]
macOS (OS X) (ScummVM) December 17, 2019[1]
Linux (ScummVM) December 17, 2019[1]
Taxonomy
Monetization One-time game purchase
Modes Singleplayer
Controls Point and select
Genres Adventure
Themes Cyberpunk, Detective/mystery, North America
Series Blade Runner
Blade Runner on HowLongToBeat
Blade Runner on IGDB
Blade Runner on MobyGames
Blade Runner on Wikipedia
Blade Runner
Blade Runner 1997
Blade Runner 2049: Memory Lab 2017
Blade Runner 9732 (unofficial) 2018
Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition 2022
Blade Runner 2033: Labyrinth TBA

Blade Runner is a singleplayer adventure game in the Blade Runner series.

General information

GOG.com Community Discussions for game series
GOG.com Support Page
Steam Community Discussions

Availability

Source DRM Notes Keys OS
Retail
DRM details are not known
CD-ROM and DVD-ROM versions exist.
Windows
GOG.com
DRM-free
Pre-packaged with ScummVM.
Can be bought standalone or bundled with Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition.
Windows
macOS (OS X)
Linux
Steam
Icon overlay.png
Pre-packaged with ScummVM.
Bundled with Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition.
Windows
The DVD-ROM version has the same content as the CD-ROM version without the need to swap discs.
The GOG.com release does not include the original desktop icon. A replacement can be found here.

Essential improvements

Official patch

Download the patch for the CD-ROM version or the DVD-ROM version.

ScummVM

As of 16 June 2019, the ScummVM engine supports Blade Runner. For more information, see the ScummVM wiki page.

This method does not require an external installer or installation of any additional patches.

Alternate installer for retail version

Allows installation from the CD/DVD releases on 64-bit Windows.
Automatically installs both the official patch and the wrapper.
Does not copy the file HDFRAMES.DAT so it needs to be downloaded from here or copied from the game disc to <path-to-game>.

Aqrit's ddwrapper

Fixes timing issues with the shooting range and "rat in the tunnel" portions of the game.

Peixoto's patch

Peixoto's patch adds nearest neighbor or xBRz scaler for better visuals. Sets single core affinity and Windows 98 compatibility mode for improved stability.

Game data

Configuration file(s) location

System Location
Windows <path-to-game>\BLADE.INI[Note 1]
macOS (OS X)
Linux
Steam Play (Linux) <Steam-folder>/steamapps/compatdata/1678420/pfx/[Note 2]
It's unknown whether this game follows the XDG Base Directory Specification on Linux. Please fill in this information.

Save game data location

System Location
Windows <path-to-game>\SAVE\*.SAV[Note 1]
macOS (OS X)
Linux
Steam Play (Linux) <Steam-folder>/steamapps/compatdata/1678420/pfx/[Note 2]

Save game cloud syncing

System Native Notes
GOG Galaxy
Steam Cloud
ScummVM 2.1+ supports cloud saves on third-party cloud storage services. See the ScummVM documentation for details.

Video

Input

Keyboard and mouse State Notes
Remapping
See the glossary page for potential workarounds.
Mouse acceleration
Mouse sensitivity
Mouse input in menus
Mouse Y-axis inversion
Controller
Controller support
Controller types

Audio

In-game general settings.
In-game general settings.

Audio feature State Notes
Separate volume controls
Music, Sound Effects, Ambient Sound, Speech.
Ambient Sound setting is not available in ScummVM.
Surround sound
[2]
Subtitles
Only supported in ScummVM (v2.1+). Toggled from ScummVM's GUI (Audio tab) or in-game from KIA "Game Settings". Requires SUBTITLES.MIX, available from ScummVM official website.
Closed captions
Mute on focus lost
Royalty free audio

Localizations

Issues fixed

Game won't start

Game will crash on start if computer does not have an optical drive mounted.

In Windows 10, opening the ISO will create a drive automatically.
Mount a virtual optical drive
  1. Install WinCDEmu.
  2. Mount a virtual optical drive.
  3. Launch game.

Shooting range and rat/tunnel issues

On modern CPUs, shooting range targets never appear or take minutes to. A similar issue occurs with the "rat in the tunnel" portion of the game.

Apply the CPU patch[3]

Save games not working

Manually create a SAVE folder under <path-to-game>[citation needed]

Other information

API

Technical specs Supported Notes
DirectDraw 5.0 640x480
Executable 32-bit 64-bit Notes
Windows

System requirements

Windows
Minimum Recommended
Operating system (OS) 95, NT 4.0
Processor (CPU) Intel Pentium 90
System memory (RAM) 16 MB
Hard disk drive (HDD) 150 MB
Video card (GPU) SVGA graphics card
2 MB of VRAM
DirectX 5.0 compatible
macOS (OS X)
Minimum
Operating system (OS) 10.11
Processor (CPU) Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz
System memory (RAM) 1 GB
Hard disk drive (HDD) 2 GB
Video card (GPU) 64 MB of VRAM
Linux
Minimum
Operating system (OS) Ubuntu 18.04
Processor (CPU) 2.0 GHz
System memory (RAM) 1 GB
Hard disk drive (HDD) 2 GB
Video card (GPU) OpenGL compatible
256 MB of VRAM


Notes

  1. 1.0 1.1 When running this game without elevated privileges (Run as administrator option), write operations against a location below %PROGRAMFILES%, %PROGRAMDATA%, or %WINDIR% might be redirected to %LOCALAPPDATA%\VirtualStore on Windows Vista and later (more details).
  2. 2.0 2.1 File/folder structure within this directory reflects the path(s) listed for Windows and/or Steam game data (use Wine regedit to access Windows registry paths). Games with Steam Cloud support may store data in ~/.steam/steam/userdata/<user-id>/1678420/ in addition to or instead of this directory. The app ID (1678420) may differ in some cases. Treat backslashes as forward slashes. See the glossary page for details.

References