proveisso: sorry about the delay. I'm not used to checkin here, and I'm for some reason not receiving emails telling me there are new replies =(
So, one thing that DOS version beats Win95 version for ANY Windows, actually, is the ability to play it in window mode - be it with DOSBOX or any other dos-emulator.
I've bought LOTR Royal Edition and LOTR 3, and I'm not much a fan of playing old games on full screen - specially since most of those games were not designed to run in resolutions different from 4:3.
I remember that besides the resolution, there were a few other weird things that happened when I ran LOTR 1 on Win8, but it's been so long that I can remember exactly the problems... if you really need, I'll run it again to see.
Matt, I'd like access to your Skydrive to download the DOS version, if you'd let me =) thanks for that!
What HereComeThe2000 says is true. After buying Lords 2 from GOG, I loved it so much, that I bought the Royal Edition on CD from Amazon (new and
factory sealed for like $100) as a collector's item. That's when we found out Sierra Entertainment skimped out on us. Only the LOTR 2 CD contains the DOS executables. The LOTR 1 CD does not, nor does the LOTR 2 expansion pack (in fact, after doing some research, I found out that the expansion pack was indeed
never released for DOS, only Win95).
You'd actually have to buy the floppy disc versions to get the DOS executables, but the problem with that is you have lower sound and graphics quality with some features missing (like the German map missing from LOTR 1. Sadly, only the CD version for Win95 contains the extra maps and features. The DOS version does not).
If your only concern is indeed Full Screen, my advice is installing VirtualBox (free and open source) and installing an older Windows OS (95, 98, 2000, XP) as a "Guest System". Then you could put the VirtualBox screen itself in Windowed Mode thus allowing your game to do the same.