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I got the Blade Runner Final Cut Tin for Christmas which got me thinking about the game I played a few years ago. I remembered finding out that I wasn't a replicant shortly before driving off with the girl. One thing that always bugged me was that after I uninstalled it and deleted my save games I found out that the game has multiple endings. I decided now was the time to dust it off and have another go.

Turns out that the game uses a 16bit installer which no longer works with Vista 64. I did a bit of digging and found a script by Steve Simenic to create a shiney new installer for the game using the Nullsoft Scriptable Install System. I've been using this system for a few months now so it was good timing to find this. I made a couple of small changes to the script; the first is to remove a dependance on the user to have a D: drive to install the game to, the second change was simply to add an icon to the installer.

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One requirement for the script is a file that is only created once the game is installed called "HDFRAMES.DAT". Well more accurately the file is created during the installation process by combining several files off the installation CDs. It's kind of a catch 22 with the installer since you need to have the game installed to be able to install the game! Luckily for me I still have a 32 bit XP system around so I installed the game on that and copied the required file over the network to create the installer. Prior to that I tried searching for the file online via google, yahoo and emule.

I decided that I might as well upload all the required files so that others may have a go at playing this awesome game. The total size is just over 280MB and the files in the zip are:

• Blade.ico - icon to use for the installer
• Blade.ini - ini file to use for the game
• Blade.nsi - Steves installation file (slightly modified by me)
• Readme.txt - Steves original readme file
• HDFrames.dat - the all mighty hdframes file

All you have to do is follow the instructions in the readme file. Make sure the blade.ico file is in the same directory as the blade.nsi file so the installer can use it.

The Blade Runner Game HDFrames Zip File Including Installation Script

This isn't the full game or even the compiled installer since that would all come to over 1GB (1.179GB to be precise). You'll have to find your copy of the game elsewhere and install the Nullsoft Scriptable Install System.

On a sidenote fileshack, filehost.com and .us, obango and a few others from a google of "file host" are shit. I couldn't get a single large upload to work in IE6, IE7 or FF2. On top of that when I rummaged through their FAQ sections they all had a one liner about how if your files aren't downloaded at least once every x days then they would automatically get deleted, x being 7 days in most cases.