Vaelor

Hi all, I just purchased SimCity Societies without noting that the requirements say I need to be running XP or Vista to play. Since this is usually bullshit, my first stop is here to find out how I can get around this! I've never seen a game that couldn't be trickily install to run just fine under Win2k, and I'll be suprised if this is the first. If anybody can help me out, I'd be extremely grateful. Nothing like wasting money on a game you can't play! =( Thanks!

Hey all. A while back I got my hands on Monopoly as a digital download from Atari's catalog. However it seems to be yet another one of those damned games that claim to only work under XP, which of course is total bullshit. I messed about with the files a little trying to bypass the installer and hence the idiotic dialog box that's stopping me from neatly installing it on Win2k, but I couldn't quite get it happening. Any chance somebody could help me out getting this thing running on my 2k box? Thanks!

Originally Posted By: DosFreak I would pick the game up when I go to Best Buy today but from everything I've heard and read the game isn't that good. Add that to the fact that I've bought every single Simcity game but haven't played them since the first one on the Mac.......at least the other ones were good so I don't feel guilty for wasting the money. Is there a demo of the game? I got lucky, the day it came out I was given a gift card for the exact cost of the game, and there was nothing else I wanted at all so it was an easy call to get this for free. Still, feels like wasted money anyway when I can't play it. =( The installer doesn't seem to use MSI, just an EASetup.exe which spouts the error, "EASetup.exe - Entry Point Not Found - The procedure entry point GetSystemWow64DirectoryW could not be located in the dynamic link library KERNEL32.dll." =( To my knowledge, there's no demo of the game available. =(

It's an installer issue. Actually I've never seen one that isn't. If somebody can just get me around this ridiculous attempt to convert me to Vista, I'm sure the game will work just fine on my OS like everything else.

Hey, just wondering if anybody can help me out getting the game Freelancer working under Windows 2000? Every time I run it, it's missing half the audio, music and dialog. It makes the game absolutely unplayable. I've tried it on four systems now, the first two had identical hardware to oneanother, one running Windows XP and the other running 2000, it worked fine on the XP box but had the audio problem on the 2000 box. The other two systems were also identical to eachother hardware wise, and again, one running XP and the other 2k, and the exact same problem occurred. It's apparent that it's not a hardware issue, the game just doesn't like Windows 2000. This looks like a great game and I'm dying to play it, so if anybody can help me get it working, that would be great, thanks!

Bump. Any other ideas anyone? Thanks!

Yikes, the instructions at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/814549/en reamed up ALL my audio quite badly. I kept getting glitches, skips, and whitenoise, on everything, including WinAmp and movie files. Yech... I managed to get everything else working again by patching/reinstalling my SoundBlaster drivers, but I'm back at square one not being able to play Freelancer! Any ideas anyone? =/

Thanks for the link, I just went through the MS troubleshooting to the letter, but it unfortunately made no difference at all. =( Interesting point of note though, the Fraunhofer IIS MPEG Layer-3 Codec that it says to uninstall and reinstall, wasn't present in my codecs. As soon as I discovered that I felt certain that installing them off the Freelancer disc would solve the problem, but unfortunately, it didn't. =( Any other ideas, or am I pretty much doomed at this point? =(

Bump. Can anybody help me at all here?? Any advice that you can offer would be great! Thanks again.

Hey all. I upgraded my PC a few months ago, updated pretty much everything except my peripherals. I ghosted my OS over to the new HDDs to save reinstalling and messing around. I made a few slight tweaks and cleanups as I was doing so. When I got around to installing my games again, I found that none of my 16 bit games will run anymore! Every single time I try to run any 16 bit game executable, I get this error:- Code: 16 bit MS-DOS SubsystemX:\directory\subdirectory\executableorshortcut.exeThe NTVDM CPU has encountered an illegal instruction.CS:0008 IP:98a7 OP:0f 00 50 e8 91 Choose 'Close' to terminate the application.[ Close ] [ Ignore ] I've spent months troubleshooting this issue. I went through all the steps to debug the NTVDM, followed all the steps from Microsoft's tech docs, and so on. All the tests to see if the NTVDM is corrupt, work fine. COMMAND.COM loads fine. 16 bit Windows applications work fine. But when I want to play a DOS game, no dice. Using VDMSound doesn't help, because it still relies on the NTVDM subsystem. DOSbox, which is pure emulation, works fine. At first I thought it was something I changed when I ghosted my OS, so I did a clean reinstall, still didn't work. I then tried booting off a Windows XP UBCD, and even from the clean boot environment, exact same error, which proves it's the hardware itself and nothing on my OS setup. I've had several friends and even hired "expert" technicians to look at it - nobody has even the slightest clue what's wrong or what to do about it. These are the specs of the new system:- ASUS M2N-E NVIDIA nForce® 570 Ultra™ MCP Socket AM2 Motherboard AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 3600+ Dual-Core Socket AM2 CPU Kingston HyperX 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 675 (PC2 5400) Dual Channel SDRAM ...and some other stuff which is far less likely to be relevant. Does anybody know of any issues in which this hardware could totally eradicate the NTVDM 16 bit subsystem of Windows 2000 and render it completely impossible to play any legacy games without the aid of pure emulation? I know I can use DOSBox for my gaming if I have to, but I've always preferred VDMSound where possible, so if I can resolve this problem, it would be a huge load off this old gamer's mind! My hardware upgrade enabled me to play one game I couldn't play on my old system, but killed off several dozen of my favorite classics in the process! Not a fair tradeoff! =(

Hi all, I am tearing my hair out trying to get LSL7 running on my Windows 2000 Pro SP4 machine. It's one of those godawful hybrid games that was made when DOS was dying but Windows wasn't widespread yet, so it claims to be compatible with DOS, Win3.1, and Win95, but it's such a nightmarish mishmash of standards that it seems to be near impossible to get it to run on modern OSs. I followed the instructions given for making it work under WinXP, since often those solutions are good for Win2k also, but in this case, it seems that solution relies upon running programs in Compatability Mode to force a certain screen res. and color depth, and Win2k doesn't support that feature. When I follow all the instructions except that part, and try to run the game, it launches with the error:- Error 105: Script# 64962 ($ff0c6764+) Followed by an [OK] button which terminates the crashed application. I've had this kind of problem with pretty much any game that was released for hybrid DOS/Win3.1 compatability (what a dreadful time in history for gamers!), but I don't recall how I've fixed this in the past. Can anybody help me muddle through this? I've just finished replaying through LSL 1-6, and it would be infuriating to have to skip 7 because of OS incompatability! =( Thanks!

Okay, thanks DosFreak. I don't expect I'd ever get any useful response from VUGames, but I'll give VOGONS a crack. Thanks again for your help.

DosFreak, thanks for your prompt reply. I followed your instructions and added the compatibility mode library, and then I modified the LSL7 shortcut to run in Windows 95 Compatibility Mode. Unfortunately, I get the exact same error in the exact same way as I did before, so it would seem that omitting that step from the instructions on getting it working under XP, was not my problem after all. So, back to square one then - does anybody know how to get Larry 7: Love For Sail running on Windows 2000? (PS:- jmmijo - I found three copies of slayerui.dll on my system, and none of them were in the \WINNT base directory. The one I ended up using was from \WINNT\AppPatch. Hope that helps.)

Hey all.. just wondering if somebody could help me solve a huge puzzle with my Windows 2000 Pro box.. A little while ago, I came to notice that my 16-bit subsystem (NTVDM) had stopped functioning. The first clue was that none of my old DOS-based games worked at all anymore. At first I thought it was a problem with VDMsound, which I reinstalled a couple of time with no effect, but upon closer inspection I discovered that NTVDM wasn't staying loaded when I started up Windows. By watching the task manager during bootup, I saw that NTVDM.EXE was being loaded, but was exiting immediately. I tried running NTVDM.EXE manually also, with the exact same result. At the moment, I can't run any DOS-based games or software that require the 16-bit subsystem to run under 32-bit Windows environments. I have about an intermediate to advanced level of skill with configuring and troubleshooting Windows, and I can't seem to find any way to reinstall/repair/troubleshoot NTVDM, nor any useful information about it online. I've also had a couple of expert level friends with MSCE's and the like take a look, they were stumped as well. In the end, I even paid a house-calling tech support guy to come over and take a look, and even he left stumped. Can anybody please tell me how I can repair, or at least reinstall, the NTVDM 16-bit subsystem on my Windows 2000 box so I can play my old games again? I've managed to tide myself over for a while playing new games, but I've just bought a stack of classic vintage games and I'd really like to play them now!! Any information or advice anybody can give me on this matter would be hugely appreciated!! Thanks in advance! =)

Uh, I know it's probably rude to have waited four months to say this, but thanks DosFreak - your solution fixed my problem, and I haven't had any problems with NTVDM since then. Sorry if this seems like gravedigging here, I only just realized that I'd never followed up on this and didn't want it to go completely unthanked considering how grateful I was for the big fix!

I have discovered an extremely annoying problem with my main PC. It seems that audio crashes it. I first noticed this when playing Warlords Battlecry II, once in a while when playing the game it would completely hard crash the system, no Alt-Tab, no Ctrl-Alt-Del, nothing short of a hard reset/power off would get me out. I assumed this was just a game glitch, or at least an incompatibility with that game under Win2k. Lately, The Sims 2 has started doing the same thing to me. Randomly for no apparent reason, it just totally freezes the entire system. Still, I figured it was coincedence - I've never found anything else that can completely crash this machine, and Win2k is not reknowned for being the Gamer's Best Friend of operating systems. But after recently relocating and reinstalling my system, I couldn't seem to get my Logitech Z-680 sound system working. I could get audio output through my headphones, but not through the 5.1 setup. In the process of trying to work out what the hell was wrong with them, I discovered something interesting - the system also completely hard crashes occasionally when I run the Creative AudioHQ speaker test. Exact same thing - no task manager, no Get Out Of Jail Free card, no love. Just a reset button or nothing. Now I'm starting to think it's actually my sound card, or something related to it (PCI slot, drivers, DirectX, etc?) causing the crashes rather than the games. After all, I rarely play a lot of music or watch movies on my PC these days, so the audio card only sees serious use when I'm gaming - and that's when it always crashes! My system here is an Athlon XP 2400+, with 512Mb generic RAM, and a Sound Blaster Live! Digital Entertainment 5.1 (SE) card, running Windows 2000 Pro SP4. Can anybody help me out here with working out why my audio card seems to be crashing my system, and what I can do to prevent this? It's driving me quite literally mad. =/ Any and all advice - even guesstimates! - would be appreciated at this point! Thanks in advance.

Ahh yep, it was a fried PCI slot. I moved the SBLive card to the next slot over, and nothing's crashed once since. Thanks for your help, for some reason I didn't even think of that! =/ Cheers.