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Installing 'Odyssey: The Search for Ulysses' on Windows XP #963039
06/17/14 07:47 PM
06/17/14 07:47 PM
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RichAlexis Offline OP
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Hi all,

I have the multilingual DVD edition of 'Odyssey: The Search for Ulysses' from (the year) 2000, and am trying to get it to run on Windows XP. Because I had no trouble at all installing 'Timescape: Journey to Pompeii/Pompeii: The Legend of Vesuvius', a similar DVD edition by Cryo from the same year, I thought this one would be plain sailing wink. But no.

First I got the error message ISDX_ERR_BADWINDOWSVERSION, and whatever I tried after that, the installation was always aborted, and the installed files removed.

So I decided to go the the 'Setup.exe' file on the DVD, and set the File Properties to Windows 98/Windows ME compatibility before installing. This worked fine without any glitches, but when I started the game (also set to Windows 98/ME compatibility, I also tried 95), the initial production credits were rolling, but the introductory cutscene, showing Heritias setting off on his journey, wouldn't show, and the program crashed.

I now wonder if it can be played on higher versions than Windows 98/ME at all. On the back cover, it says "This game cannot be played on Windows NT", and as Windows XP and higher are further developments of NT, my guess is that I can only get the cutscenes to show up if I install it in a Windows 95 or 98 virtual machine. I used Qemu for playing 'Beyond Atlantis/Atlantis II' and that ran fine, if a bit sluggish.

A very handy archived DreamCatcher listing (the company that took over the Cryo titles after bankruptcy) at

DreamCatcher XP Notice from 2002

says that the title may work on Windows XP, but is not fully compatible.

Any ideas?

Rich

Last edited by RichAlexis; 06/17/14 08:06 PM.
Re: Installing 'Odyssey: The Search for Ulysses' on Windows XP [Re: RichAlexis] #963046
06/17/14 08:20 PM
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I have this game, but I have never tried to install it. I'm thinking it would probably run in Virtual PC (I have Windows 98 SE running in Virtual PC), which I do have installed on my Windows 7 computer. I will give that a try one of these days.

Re: Installing 'Odyssey: The Search for Ulysses' on Windows XP [Re: RichAlexis] #963067
06/17/14 11:35 PM
06/17/14 11:35 PM
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One site suggested changing the Setup to Windows 2000 compatibility before installing rather than using Windows 98. That may have been for the CD version though.

There is also a hex edit suggested in a post from "Lynn" here
http://archive.adventuregamers.com/forums/showthread.php?p=564477
Alternatively the post links to a download of the pre-edited file.
Again, that may be for the CD version.

They also suggest disabling hardware acceleration in the game options.
You'd certainly have to do that if you used Virtual PC.

Re: Installing 'Odyssey: The Search for Ulysses' on Windows XP [Re: Jenny100] #963069
06/17/14 11:42 PM
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I've actually got hardware acceleration working in my Virtual PC - I had to enable hardware virtualization in the BIOS in order to do it. I'm able to play both Arthur's Knights games this way on my Windows 7 computer now after having done this.

Re: Installing 'Odyssey: The Search for Ulysses' on Windows XP [Re: RichAlexis] #963073
06/18/14 12:46 AM
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Are you using VMware or Virtual PC?

Re: Installing 'Odyssey: The Search for Ulysses' on Windows XP [Re: Jenny100] #963074
06/18/14 12:47 AM
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Virtual PC.

More details can be found in an older post here.

Re: Installing 'Odyssey: The Search for Ulysses' on Windows XP [Re: Jenny100] #963133
06/18/14 10:34 AM
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Thanks all for the suggestions! smile

I tried out various hints I found here on XP (so no virtual machine yet) and it almost works!

What I tried:
  • Check or uncheck various compatibility boxes (256 colours, lower screen resoluion, no visual themes) -> no effect, still crash at first cutscene.
  • Run as administrator on/off -> no effect, crash.
  • Install game under Windows 2000 compatibility, or run it that way -> no effect, or immediate crash.
  • Tried to download Lynn's 'odyssee.7z' patch for installed executable -> no longer exists at address, nor anywhere else on the net.
  • Edited the address in the *.exe file with PSPad HEXedit, as Lynn indicated:
    • Start at Address: 003626F5
      Change: A9 00 00 00 02 74
      To: 25 FF FF FF 3F EB
      Save and use to replace game's "odyssee.exe"

      -> worked! smile The menu showed up and the cutscene played!
  • Problem: I get shimmering, jittering, epilepsy-inducing images whenever I open a dialogue box, which in this case is a figure overlay which slides down on the screen. So I tried disabling hardware acceleration from the Windows Control Panel -> Display icon. This worked! smile
    Now, I assume I can tweak my graphics card for this particular program, so I don't have to disable the acceleration every time I play the game - I like it enabled for other media programs. As I don't have NVDIA, but ASUS Extreme AX300, I'm not sure yet if and how I can do that.
  • Tried switching hardware acceleration on/off with the game menu -> no effect.

But so far, so good, I feel I'm getting there! At least it is playable!

Rich

Last edited by RichAlexis; 06/19/14 11:20 AM.
Re: Installing 'Odyssey: The Search for Ulysses' on Windows XP [Re: RichAlexis] #963158
06/18/14 12:53 PM
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That's very encouraging, Rich! It's amazing what we will go through in order to get a game to run, isn't it? lol

Re: Installing 'Odyssey: The Search for Ulysses' on Windows XP [Re: RichAlexis] #963165
06/18/14 01:26 PM
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Thanks for getting back to us with your results, and glad to hear it is at least "playable" now.

According to this
http://www.asus.com/Graphics_Cards/Extreme_AX300TD128M/
and this
http://www.gpuzoo.com/GPU-ASUS/Extreme_AX300_-_Extreme_AX300_TD_128M.html

the ASUS Extreme AX300 is based on ATI RADEON X300SE.
It probably uses tweaked ATI Radeon drivers.

That may account for the difference in results -- Lynn didn't mention a problem with "epilepsy-inducing images," though she did mention a problem with the character disappearing.

Quote:
Tried switching hardware acceleration on/off with the game menu -> no effect.

It certainly had an effect in Windows 98 back when the game was released.
Too bad it doesn't seem to work in XP -- at least not with your video card (it seemed to work for Lynn).

+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+


*** quote from old thread on Arthur's Knights ***
Originally Posted By: Marian
I had been wanting to replay Arthur's Knights: Tales of Chivalry and Arthur's Knights: Secrets of Merlin for quite some time, but all attempts to install it on a newer OS, including Windows XP with Service Pack 3 (with and without Virtual PC), had failed. The last time I was able to get both of these games working was when I had my Windows 98 computer, many years ago.

So, over the weekend my son and I installed Virtual PC 2007 on my Windows 7 computer, then installed Windows 98 SE as the guest on Virtual PC. We then installed the first Arthur's Knights and got as far as the main menu and noticed that hardware acceleration was checked by default. Assuming we needed to run the game in software mode, we tried to uncheck hardware acceleration and could not; for whatever reason, the game did not allow us to uncheck the box, and again when trying to get into the actual game, it crashed.

My son pondered this problem for a while and did some googling - and then he arrived at the solution. This was the key that led to success for us: he went into the BIOS and enabled virtualization, which was disabled by default. After having done this, we were then allowed to check a box in Virtual PC under File: Options, pertaining to enabling virtualization, which had previously been greyed out; then you can make sure that hardware virtualization is enabled in Settings afterwards. We then tried to run the game again and this time the game ran perfectly with hardware acceleration enabled! We then went on and installed the second Arthur's Knights game and were met with the same success.

I wanted to post this info in case it helps someone else. These games are notoriously difficult to get running properly, sometimes even on systems for which they were intended, and now they both run perfectly on Windows 7 in this virtual environment. I played the first Arthur's Knights game yesterday for about three hours and had no problems whatsoever.

One caveat is that not all processors support virtualization. If your processor has at least two cores, though, it should support virtualization.

Thanks, Marian. I'd completely forgotten about that thread.
Unfortunately Microsoft disabled Virtual PC in Windows 8, which makes it hard for me to test on my current gaming computer.

Re: Installing 'Odyssey: The Search for Ulysses' on Windows XP [Re: Jenny100] #963168
06/18/14 01:36 PM
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Originally Posted By: Jenny100

Unfortunately Microsoft disabled Virtual PC in Windows 8, which makes it hard for me to test on my current gaming computer.


I didn't know that. thumbsdown

Re: Installing 'Odyssey: The Search for Ulysses' on Windows XP [Re: Marian] #963207
06/18/14 03:52 PM
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Thanks again Marian and Jenny for all the great suggestions! thumbsup

I think I should report immediate SUCCESS here!

Yes, these efforts of ours constitute quests of nearly odyssean proportions! I think the game itself can only pale in comparison! wink

I must say I don't understand a bit of this hexadecimal editing (how on earth could one find out what to do?), and I don't think there's any general applicability to similar games, but it works.

So the only minor irritation is this hardware acceleration tweaking.

The reports on this forum suggested that you could switch this on and off for individual applications with NVIDIA, much like the file compatibilty settings, or the acceleration tab on the Adobe Flash Player settings.

But I haven't worked that out yet.

Rich

Last edited by RichAlexis; 06/19/14 11:20 AM.
Re: Installing 'Odyssey: The Search for Ulysses' on Windows XP [Re: RichAlexis] #963322
06/19/14 11:18 AM
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It turns out my success was short-lived, so I had to do some more tweaking. I made nice progress, until Heritias (or Heriseus, as the subtitles have him) tried to get past the guard at the army camp. Then suddenly the dialogue sound dropped out. It came back when Heritias approached the prostitute (Hello, sailor! - why is it that that these French games always seem to have prostitutes? I wonder wink ). Then the dialogue sound crackled, stuttered, and dropped out completely.

So I figured this had probably something to do with DirectX, and with the hardware acceleration I had completely shut down. So I turned the hardware acceleration slide from completely off up to the third notch (see image), to find the optimum setting where the sound would be okay, but the dialogue image wouldn't start to break apart and flicker.



Rich

Last edited by RichAlexis; 06/19/14 11:22 AM.
Re: Installing 'Odyssey: The Search for Ulysses' on Windows XP [Re: RichAlexis] #963323
06/19/14 11:24 AM
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Good troubleshooting tip, Rich. I had to adjust this setting with Arthur's Knights too - I had to set the acceleration to one notch to the right of none; otherwise, on full acceleration, the character would not climb stairs but would rather just walk in place at the bottom of the stairs.

Re: Installing 'Odyssey: The Search for Ulysses' on Windows XP [Re: Jenny100] #967434
07/12/14 02:46 PM
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Originally Posted By: Jenny100
Unfortunately Microsoft disabled Virtual PC in Windows 8, which makes it hard for me to test on my current gaming computer.


Jenny, I was reading some pages on Metzomagic's (Steve's) website today, and found this:

Quote:
Hey, Virtual PC 2007 works fine in Windows 8 too!
There's a small number of very old games that fall in between the cracks, so so speak, of techniques that can be used to get them running on modern operating systems. They were all made in the 1995 - 1998 time frame, when DOS was on the way out and Windows 95/98 was starting to come into play as a gaming platform. One of these games is an obscure yet fairly respectable adventure game, Amber: Journeys Beyond. It depends on an ancient version of QuickTime, and also on an old scripting language. So you really need to be running Windows 95/98 in order to accomplish this. And that means you need either a very old PC, or virtual OS technology.

In theory, you ought to be able to employ the latest in virtual machine technology to solve this sort of problem in Windows 8, a thingy called Hyper-V. But the catch is that it will only work with hardware that was developed in the last year or two. Since my PC is more than 5 years old, well... might as well fugeddaboutit.

But even though Microsoft are trying to push Hyper-V as their latest and greatest virtualisation solution, and it seems that Virtual PC 2007 falls over at the first hurdle and refuses to run in Windows 8, there is a very simple way to get it running. After installing Virtual PC 2007, all you have to do is rename the executable file from VirtualPC.exe to something like VPC.exe and away you go. Windows was only checking that the file name wasn't on some list of deprecated programmes it didn't want you to run any longer :-) I've updated the metzomagic.com Virtual PC 2007 FAQ to reflect this information.


I thought you might find this of interest. smile

Re: Installing 'Odyssey: The Search for Ulysses' on Windows XP [Re: RichAlexis] #967439
07/12/14 03:35 PM
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I'd read about similar workarounds -- renaming the Virtual PC exe, replacing a dll file, a registry hack, an "installer" or "patch" of unknown provenance.

And recently I found this on the Microsoft site:
***Windows 8.1 Compatibility for Virtual PC***
where Microsoft themselves claim Virtual PC works on Windows 8.1 but not 8.

But apparently Virtual PC doesn't work for everyone -- at least not reliably.
Random crashes that don't occur with Windows 7.

Re: Installing 'Odyssey: The Search for Ulysses' on Windows XP [Re: Jenny100] #967456
07/12/14 04:46 PM
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Thank you for that additional info, Jenny.

Re: Installing 'Odyssey: The Search for Ulysses' on Windows XP [Re: RichAlexis] #967464
07/12/14 05:32 PM
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I was wondering why Google found workarounds for Virtual PC and Windows 8 but not 8.1 -- until I found that Microsoft site. Of course there are still problems. I wonder if it's due more to multiple processors than Windows itself.

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