I've been hanging out at my parents house with my dad while my mom visits some of her sisters in Arizona, and I wanted to take the time to getting Resident Evil 1, 2, and 3 running on my PC (Razr Blade Stealth Laptop), and its been a perilous effort to say the least. It's been a total, time sink, and there are some technical issues that are impossible to overcome trying to run the games on modern systems. It really is unfortunate, because the PC versions are actually quite enjoyable to play.
Resident Evil 1:
Virgin Interactive published the game for windows 95 in 1996. The cd is a little hard to come by these days, but I have one from childhood that I have taken good care of. The cool thing about the game is that it allows you to run it in 640x480; while the backgrounds are pre-rendered at 320x240, it's not too jarring. And it's pretty cool as the only way to see the character models without the geometry being really jittery like on PSone. Not only that, but the game has full-colored and uncensored FMVs that I don't believe were ever available in the US releases of Resident Evil on Playstation. The controls aren't bad either. I seem to remember the analog controls for the first three Resident Evil games on Playstation being pretty unusable, but using the right analog stick of an Xbox One controller is actually very comfortable.
The most horrifying aspect is the insurmountable graphics glitches. I tried a ton of approaches. Downloading programs like dgVoodoo2 and nGlide to try and emulate 3dfx cards, difficult to track down official patches that have disappeared from defunct sites; but no matter what I get these heinous looking black boxes around the backgrounds of the game. From what I've read so far, this is unfixable.
I have a nVidia GTX-970m that I'm really happy with for most things. The little computer packs a punch and the design form is pretty great. Still, these wonky old Windows 95 games are a pain in the butt to run. I've lost sound randomly and had to reinstall, the video playback has gone away, certain configurations immediately crash the game, all sorts of annoying little problems. Very cool content wise though.
Resident Evil 2
I cheated a little with this one and forgoed the American windows release, The Platinum Edition, and tried the Japanese Windows DVD release of Biohazard 2 Sourcenext edition. The funky thing about this release is that you can't configure the game at all. It's presented in a 640x480 resolution, and the backgrounds are 320x240, just like the first game's PC port.
I didn't have many issues getting it to work, nothing close to the last game, just figuring out how to install it when the installer was all in Japanese. The jankiest thing is the English patch, which is far from complete and has some text formatting issues. The english text is stretched out. I presume this is because of the english letters having to fit into Japanese character formatting.
It's pretty incredible. I don't have my gamecube copy handy here at my folk's place, but I feel like the content on this version of the game is sublime. Right from the get go, you can choose Claire or Leon's A scenarios without swapping discs. There's an arrange mode immediately available, as well as battle mode, 4th survivor, and tofu survivor. The absolute coolest thing is the gallery. Like, holy smokes, there's so much awesome production art, published art, and 3D character models to view. You can watch any cutscene of the game here as well. It's beyond anything I've ever seen, even in the legacy collections for other franchises that capcom has been putting out. It's a really tremendous gift to fans. I feel like I've heard the dreamcast version has 640x480 backgrounds? Don't people usually consider that the best version? If it's also 320x240 backgrounds, I think this sourcenext version has to be the definitive version.
Resident Evil 3
I have the American version for this game. It's kind of a mixed bag at first. I don't know what's up with the port, but the character models have that jittery geometry and perspective issues that PSone games have. The game's backgrounds are 640x480, which is nice. You have the option to make the resolution as high as 1280x1224, but going any higher than 640x480 breaks the backgrounds, at least on my system. I think some of the foreground elements are in lower resolution than the background, which is weird. The sounds are low quality, as are the videos. There's a patch called
'The Resident Evil 3 Restoration Project' which replaces the game's videos and sound with higher quality versions. It's pretty nice. One issue that's unfortunate is the game's control issues. So, without xpadder or something, it's really hard to get the game to recognize button strokes as you're mapping them out. It kind of freaks out and applies whatever your last pressed button is to every single command. I had to set one button, exit the menu, then go back to set the next button. Then after all that, the game doesn't recognize 8 direction movement with digital controls, so you can only move in straight directions, and need to stop and turn separately to change direction at all. The analogue movement works alright though.
Content wise, you have all of Jill's costumes selectable at the start, as well as all the epilogues available to view. It's not a bad package, and it wasn't too difficult at all to get running. Mercenaries is available on the American version of Resident Evil 3, but it's a separate executable file. I kind of appreciated the presentation of RE2/Biohazard 2's source next version. Everything was just kind of neatly packaged and didn't require a lot of fine tuning, although the technical options were non-existent. Maybe I wouldn't have liked that if RE2 didn't work; but it took some finessing to get RE3 to run, and some grind out hard ass work to get RE to run. I don't know what's on RE3's sourcenext version; it would be interesting if it had a gallery like Biohazard 2 sourcenext. I'm also not sure if the character models have better subpixel accuracy.
Anyway, I say this a lot, but it's really frustrating we don't get these games available on GOG, if not a full collection like Mega Man Legacy 1 & 2, or the Disney Afternoon collection, or Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection. Most those games are older than the first three Resident Evil games. I feel like it took a great amount of effort to get these three running, and the first Resident Evil isn't really running as it should; but whatever the case, Capcom has three pretty stellar high-fidelity PC ports that they could port from if they wanted to. For consumers, there's a certain bar to entry the way things are. These games aren't cheap second hand, and it takes some technical know-how to get them in running order. I mean, it seems like the modding and speed running communities have basically gotten things in running order, it doesn't seem like it would take a gargantuan effort to get things running smoothly on any current architecture with paid programmers. I feel like these games need to be preserved, especially if the rumors of REmake2 being a TPS (or canceled?) are true.
In the meantime, if you have any of these games lying around, and want to get them running, I found communities like
Resident Evil Modifications Message Board to be quite helpful in sourcing patches and fixes to get these guys running on modern hardware. Good luck fellas.