Finally - Everyone can now play Dark Side of the Moon in XP

1. Download this zip archive. Inside it you'll find a file named riched32.dll. Extract it somewhere.
http://www.mediafire.com/?4hevvidc7bvcl03

2. Open the folder where you installed the game, then open 'bin' folder and put the extracted file in there. If, for example, the path for your installed game is 'CProgram Files\SouthPeak Interactive\DSOM', you should put the extracted file (riched32.dll) in the folder 'CProgram Files\SouthPeak Interactive\DSOM\bin'

3. Run the game and tell me if it works for you.

I'll provide some details in case anyone is interested. The common belief is that the problem with the missing text in DSOM is caused by the game being unable to read text or some files not installed properly. I've run the game in the debugger and found out that it is not really the case - the text is actually there in memory while the game is running, it's just that for some reason it's not showing up. While examining the game in the debugger, I've also found out that DSOM handles text in Rich Text format and uses Microsoft Rich Edit control. Up till now there are several versions of Rich Edit and the newer ones, according to Microsoft, are supposed to be backward compatible with the older ones, but in reality it’s only true up to some degree. Now, different Rich Edit versions (read: different DLLs) are distributed with different versions of Windows. Rich Edit 1.0 (riched32.dll) is included in Windows 95. Windows 98 includes both Rich Edit 1.0 and Rich Edit 2.0 (riched32.dll and riched20.dll accordingly) and Windows XP includes Rich Edit 3.0 (its corresponding DLL is confusingly named riched20.dll) and Rich Edit 1.0 emulator (riched32.dll, which is in fact a thin wrapper around riched20.dll). DSOM loads riched32.dll, i.e. uses Rich Edit 1.0 (which figures, since the game was made for Windows 95.) I suspected that there might be an incompatibility between the Rich Edit 1.0 which the game was programmed with in mind and the emulator provided by the recent versions of Windows. So I copied the riched32.dll from my Windows 98 distribution to the game folder where there other DLLs that depend on it and you know the rest.

Also, there are three different versions of riched32.dll (can you imagine that) and only one of them (with the version number 4.0.993.4) is redistributable. Fortunately, the one that is also happens to be just the one that is required by the game.

The bottom line is that Microsoft is to blame for breaking compatibility and creating this mess

For those of you who have to disable video acceleration to make DSOM work, I've made a small patch which forces the game to use hardware emulation only, preventing it from using any hardware-supported features. The result should be exactly the same as disabling hardware acceleration, only the patch won't affect any global settings in your system (so you don't have to restore anything after playing the game).

The patched game dll is in this archive . Open your DSOM\Bin folder, find the file named xvideoio.dll and make a backup copy of it. Then copy the patched xvideoio.dll from the downloaded archive to DSOM\Bin

I recommend you use the patch only if the game doesn't work properly on your system unless hardware acceleration is disabled completely. Don't use it otherwise.

Is there any way to copy all the cd's to the hard drive so you won't have to do all the disc swapping (especially near the end) ?

Have you tried setting the affinity of the game to a single processor?

For those of you who have to disable video acceleration to make DSOM work, I've made a small patch which forces the game to use hardware emulation only, preventing it from using any hardware-supported features. The result should be exactly the same as disabling hardware acceleration, only the patch won't affect any global settings in your system (so you don't have to restore anything after playing the game).

The patched game dll is in this archive . Open your DSOM\Bin folder, find the file named xvideoio.dll and make a backup copy of it. Then copy the patched xvideoio.dll from the downloaded archive to DSOM\Bin

I recommend you use the patch only if the game doesn't work properly on your system unless hardware acceleration is disabled completely. Don't use it otherwise.

For those of you who have to disable video acceleration to make DSOM work, I've made a small patch which forces the game to use hardware emulation only, preventing it from using any hardware-supported features. The result should be exactly the same as disabling hardware acceleration, only the patch won't affect any global settings in your system (so you don't have to restore anything after playing the game).

The patched game dll is in this archive. Open your DSOM\Bin folder, find the file named xvideoio.dll and make a backup copy of it. Then copy the patched xvideoio.dll from the downloaded archive to DSOM\Bin

I recommend you use the patch only if the game doesn't work properly on your system unless hardware acceleration is disabled completely. Don't use it otherwise.