Tip: Running Sierra On-Line 1994-1997 published Win9x games under Win2K/XP

[aerisama 0]

Concerns most Sierra On-Line games released 1994-1997 for the Windows 95/98 platform. I have until now thought most of my troubles were due to DirectX incompatibility, but this is actually not the case (apart from some screen anomalies the few games I have seem stable). I'm running Win2K, so test results on XP would be appreciated (if you even had problems to begin with).

 

So all-in-all, just a quick heads-up for people, who have had trouble running these. Most usual symptoms are:

 

1) SETUP.EXE gives "General Protection Fault" or "Integer divide by 0 during install" error.

2) Game simply crashes on every startup after succesful install (most often SETUP.EXE beginning to fail in unison, even if it worked before)

3) Game complains the game CD is not in the drive, and refuses to run/continue (or movies/music don't play)

 

Here's what you do:

 

I) delete the SIERRA.INI file from your system directory. Do a search for "sierra" on your system drive, and remove the .INI file.

 

II) Start SETUP.EXE and run the installation. SAY NO TO SYSTEM TEST! Continue when asked to confirm, the installation should now finish.

 

III) Find the new SIERRA.INI created under your system directory and open it. Find the [Config] heading, or if it's missing completely, adding it to the bottom of the file. Add CDRomDrives and CDROM parameters under it, so it will look like this ("X" being the CD-ROM drive letter you're using for the game):

 

[Config]

CDRomDrives=X

CDROM=4

 

IV) There is another .INI under your game directory, most likely resembling the game executable name. You should see a reference similar to SIERRA.INI just now:

 

[Config]

CDDrive=X

WindowsDir=Y:\WINDIR

 

Simply verify (and change if applicable) that "X" refers to your CD-ROM drive (needs to be the same as in SIERRA.INI), and that "Y:\WINDIR" truly refers to your Windows directory (ie. where SIERRA.INI resides).

 

V) And for the last thing before running the game, change your color mode to 256 colors. It helps

 

So that's it. So far I have Lords of the Realm II and Incredible Machine 3.0 running with ease. I believe this should get 90-100% of Sierra's '95-'98 (DX3-DX5) published games working, but I'm running out of games So if you own any old Sierra stuff, do test this and post your results here.

 

Apart from this subject, I'm really annoyed you can't edit your own contributions for ntcompatible.com, because doing one one star contribution, and one five star immediately after means the site shows the game's success average wrong. Also, as this applies to a huge amount of games, perhaps the site admins could do some kind of a mass update on these games, if other people gain success with this method.

 

.a