Taking a screenshot of this game wasn't easy. It runs well in XP, but I can't take screenshots this way (something with the video card driver, I suppose). I tried running it in DOSBox, but it aborted telling me it needed a two-button mouse. I know that some games will recognize the DOSBox mouse driver only when you start another game that uses the mouse first (Uncover It and Super Othello are such games), but that didn't work either. So I transferred it to an old Pentium with Windows 98. Guess what: the same error message. Since I happened to have CuteMouse on the floppy I used for the transfer I loaded that. Now the game wouldn't abort, but it wouldn't run properly either. I could only take that shot of the initial position.
Othi, as I found out when experimenting on pure DOS, absolutely needs a Microsoft type mouse. It won't work with a Logitech one. Under XP, this is obviously not a problem. Under 98, it can be. Unfortunately it checks for the mouse only after asking the configuration details. Othi probably requires a 386. On my PS/2 57 it ran well, on a 286 it would start but freeze when trying to build up the graphic screen.
Martin Löhlein
For those interested in current game development this name may ring a bell. Yes, you are actually looking at the first production of the Project Manager for Spellforce 2.
Back in 1995, Martin Löhlein was a student of computer science at the university of Karlsruhe. In 1998, he graduated with A Volumetric Intersection Algorithm for 3d-Reconstruction Using a Boundary-Representation. At the same time, he developed his second game, M.I.S.C. (Military Interface for Space Combat), a tactic/action space-sim, with two fellow students, Daniel Berger of the demo group Xography and Thomas Kröll. What turned out to be the final version of this game was released in 1999. It is a sort of demo with four hours of gameplay. The planned commercial version never emerged.
In 2002/3, both Martin Löhlein's webpages on the server of the university of Karlsruhe suffered the fate of all students' websites, they were removed. I was able to salvage both Othi and most of the M.I.S.C. site, including binaries, from the Wayback machine. The music is missing, most of the speech is missing, the PowerPoint presentation is there but the HTML documentation was incomplete and complicated due to the heavy use of frames that I just didn't bother. As yet, the site is not edited in any way. If something isn't there, you'll just get a 404 error.
Martin Löhlein was meanwhile working for CDV Software Entertainment AG, a Karlsruhe company. From there, he moved to his current (as of 2006) position at Phenomic. In July 2003, he married Sabine Schmidt, his Tango Argentino partner.
