The "I spent hours on [insert] and it just won't work" vent thread

[Zombeaver]

I think that at least some part of the reason I enjoy emulation is because I like the process of getting things to work, especially if it's particularly arcane or being used in a way (or on a platform) that wasn't originally intended. "Tinkering" would probably be the most appropriate term. It's fun for me. Testing and then tweaking, testing again, more tweaking... I don't know what it is, it's just enjoyable for me. I'm assuming I'm probably not alone in that regard here, but who knows. And yet, I think everyone has their limits. I think that even the most devoted of tinkerers can only hit a brick wall a finite number of times before eventually saying "Screw this..." I spent about 7 hours last night trying to get a PC game from 1997 to work (Heavy Gear). A game which, the day prior, was working perfectly fine, despite some initial hurdles. You can probably see how that might drive someone a bit nuts. I used ProcMon to monitor the attempted file and registry accesses, edited my registry, uninstalled and reinstalled about a dozen times in varying ways (it evidently doesn't like having an install folder that has spaces in it, i.e. "Heavy Gear" instead of "HeavyGear"), tried patches, tried using replacement files from another person who has the game, tried various compatibility settings, tried dgvoodoo and nglide wrappers, tried everything I could think of. I have some experience with VirtualBox as I used it years ago to run W95 but I no longer have my install/key for 95, so that's out. I briefly considered a system restore (since it was working previously) but ultimately decided "No. Sorry. I am not doing a system restore for a 20 year old game." And so, the night ended in bitter failure and with the entire evening wasted. Annoying. As. Shit. I'm assuming that others here have had this experience in some form at some point. Feel free to vent!

[SentaiBrad]

Windows 95 and 98 games were a bitch to deal with on 7, and are actually worse now on 8, and even worse on 10. 10 removed backend stuff that specific late 90's and early 2000's (up to mid 2000 I think) used as DRM. Virtualization also doesn't work because there is little to no support when it comes to 3D accelerated anything, or playing games. I wish there was a gaming version. I'd actually pay money for that, but instead im debating on building a Windows 3.11 machine and a Windows 98 / XP machine for these games and calling it a day. I can out put both to a capture card too, so I can even record them which is the benefit I get from playing games on my PC / Modern Consoles. I'll take a look at the game myself, and see what I can come up with if anything. I do know there is a DOSBox style emulator called PCem that is for Windows 95 and 98 era games. It's even being worked on to be included in RetroArch last I read. I didn't get around to using it yet, and it may be as confusing as DOSBox, but it exists and it's supposed to work to some degree.

[Zombeaver]

Hell, I wish late 90s games were as easy to deal with as DOSbox. DOSBox is a dream by comparison as far as I'm concerned. I've actually been collecting some CD-era DOS games recently and it's weirdly enjoyable to throw in a 20+ year old CD and install it through DOSbox haha. There really haven't been any DOS games that I haven't been able to get to work with a bit of effort. It's just that awkward period post-DOS but pre-W7-onward (late 90's to early 00's) that are frequently annoying as hell. Things like nglide/dgVoodoo help, but there are other issues at play too. Like I said I've used VirtualBox with a 95 environment in the past and it worked, though it was a bit more unwieldy than DOSbox; more than I'd like, to be honest. I'm not familiar with PCem, I'll definitely check that out. Regarding Heavy Gear, it's really mind-boggling; especially since it WAS working two days ago. But now, for no apparent reason, it invariably just gives me a "one or more DLLs not found" error and then a "unable to configure Heavy Gear parameter file" error and crashes immediately, no matter what I try. I really didn't make any dramatic OS changes during that period - just installing a couple of other older games. I cover most of the steps I tried in the comments here. I usually stick it out on this sort of thing but I think this one's got me beat. Maybe one day GOG will add it to their library; I can hope anyway (and vote for it in the community wishlist haha).

SentaiBrad said: ...and even worse on 10. 10 removed backend stuff that specific late 90's and early 2000's (up to mid 2000 I think) used as DRM. Virtualization also doesn't work because there is little to no support when it comes to 3D accelerated anything, or playing games.

This is actually my primary reason for not going to 10 on this machine, as dumb as that sounds EDIT: Have you ever used Windows Virtual PC? I've never used it but the videos I've seen look pretty straightforward. I don't recall having issues with 95-98 era stuff on XP, which is the environment that this provides. I'm not sure how it does on 3D accelerated stuff though... might primarily be for business applications, I'm not sure.

[SentaiBrad]

That has the same limitation for 3D Accelerated stuff too I believe. You can get games to run in these environments, but don't expect good frame rates if they run, and don't count on anything 3D. I couldn't get Grandia to run. Clock Tower would fairly easily but Dino Crisis has some issues. I actually had Dino Crisis and Clock Tower working in Windows 10. If you can install the media without the need for the disc, and you bypass the DRM checks you should be good to go, but they mostly removed it from physical media, and even some more heavily DRMed games even if you try installing not from the original media. I kind of get why they removed the Secure-rom stuff, companies don't use it anymore, it was easily cracked and it costs them lots of money to maintain those libraries across the iterations of Windows. It was probably just cheaper and less time consuming to remove it then it is to keep it. I don't really blame them, but now more then ever we need better methods of handling this stuff.

[Zombeaver]

I FIXED IT! By god this thing didn't beat me. So, after all that ridiculous SHIT that I went through... it had nothing to do with any of that. I had resigned myself to the fact that it just wasn't going to work and that I would move on. But I noticed that another completely separate game that I had recently installed (and had tested to confirm it was working) suddenly had stopped working too - Odium aka Gorky 17. I tried a couple others that were from the same period - MDK, Deus Ex, a few others... all had stopped working. I got pretty worried at this point that somehow I had messed up something in Windows. So I started doing some googling on Odium to see if anybody else had encountered a similar problem (Heavy Gear is really obscure for whatever reason so I never found help by that route). Odium (Gorky 17), on the other hand, is on Steam. It's a kinda buggy game to begin with, so a couple of suggested fixes didn't help. But then I came across one mentioning that it needed to be added to Windows' DEP (Data Execution Prevention) exception list in order to work. I added it... it worked. I added MDK... it worked. I noticed that there were two main options under DEP - "Turn on DEP for all essential Windows programs" and "Turn on DEP for all programs except the following exceptions" where you could browse and add programs. I switched it to the first option and restarted, reinstalled Heavy Gear... works perfectly. I have *no* idea how it got switched to the exception list mode, as I'd never even heard of DEP before, and certainly didn't change that setting myself. I can only assume that it was the result of some kind of Windows update. So note to others in case that run into a problem with a game from this era - check into your DEP settings! So... it's working now. Thank god... RE-TAR-DED.

[SentaiBrad]

I've heard of DEP before, but I never thought to look there. xD Glad it's working now.

[Zombeaver]

SentaiBrad said I never thought to look there.

Yeah, when I saw the suggestion in a Steam thread for Gorky 17 I was like "...what the hell is DEP?" I've never seen it before, or changed any of its settings before. I'm sure this is an instance where Windows did an update and saw a "problem" that it felt it needed to fix and changed the setting. I'm just glad there's nothing wrong with my computer... I was seriously sweating bullets for a few moments there thinking "What...have I done?" haha.

[alexis524]

remember when I was trying to install Dragon Age Inquisition on my PC. God did I rage HAM...

I had a dual core which didn't play nice with that game, so, i was upgradding my CPU anyway and jumped to a quad core Intel.

My rig more than met all the specs, but the game took forever to load to just the Bioware splash screen, then it ran at like 0.0005 FPS.

Took 10 mins to get to the start screen, animation was painfully slow. FPS improved to about 2 FPS at this point

I just couldn't understand why this game would not run as it should. Thought I had maybe missed something upgrading my drivers, so I re-installed those, still no dice.

At this point, I think i caught a major virus and was forced to reinstall W7 despite my valiant efforts to remove said malware. I managed to remove most, but not all. Hated to thought

of reinstalling, but did and low and behold, after a fresh install, DAI ran and boy did it. Everything maxed out and running at 60 FPS 

[DOS76]

A fresh install can be a hell of a thing sometime can actually make an older PC like new

[Zombeaver]

4 minutes ago, alexis524 said:

At this point, I think i caught a major virus

 

Glad you got it sorted

[DOS76]

Got G.I. Joe on my Plex server

[alexis524]

3 hours ago, DOS76 said:

A fresh install can be a hell of a thing sometime can actually make an older PC like new

Sho 'nuff.

I'm reinstalling Windows at least once a year to keep things running as they should.