This is where GreyFuss originally posted the fix for text at Gameboomers.
***Everyone can now play Dark Side of the Moon***The fix was originally posted by Winterfury at Adventuregamers, and the thread is now in their archive
http://archive.adventuregamers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3837This is a quote of Winterfury's post with the information about riched32.dll.
Make sure you have the right version of riched32.dll.
It needs to be from Windows 98, Windows 95, or Windows ME.
The link to riched32.dll in GreyFuss' and Winterfury's posts no longer work.
It explains why you need to have the right version of riched32.dll.
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.
There is also a patch for 64-bit which is discussed in the Adventuregamers thread, as well as a video patch.
Ultimately, using Virtual PC might be easier.