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The good: The final patch for the game has officially SecurRom removed so that the game runs under Windows 7 and up without a no-CD patch.

The bad: The developers never tested it – also most 1.4.3 updates require the previous update being applied 1.3.3 beforehand.

Despite the German description contradicting itself, by first stating the update 1.3.3 is included, and later on claiming 1.3.3 has to be installed first, this patch’s RAR archive really includes everything needed to update the master version 1.1.1 to 1.4.3 in one go!

Furthermore, make sure that all secondary monitors are disabled and when asked by Windows compatibility assistant after closing the game if compatibility mode should be applied, select “Program ran flawlessly”!

Caution! Do not run the game after installation! Apply the above patch first! Trying to run the game before, will cause the Starforce2 copy protection to install and Windows 11 will refuse to boot as a consequence!:

You can work around this by selecting “7) Disable driver signature enforcement” in the Startup Settings Menu (F8) .

After Windows 11 has booted up completely, run StarForce’s Driver Remover Utility.

After the next reboot, Windows 11 will boot up again flawlessly.

First: For the first installment of the game series, getting the Steam version to run is a bit finicky:
More in detail described at the Steam Community post “FIX Game start 2024“

What actually appears to happen, if you try often enough, instead of “nice1.exe is experiencing an error and has to close” you get an “Unknown error while trying to iniciate MCI Device” error. which then re-draws the window and you are in the game.

However in Windows 11 24H2 you have no mouse or any way of selecting any option and a few seconds in, it will leave full screen and it won’t re-draw the window ever again.

All hitting “esc” or “Enter” does, is prompting the “nice1.exe is experiencing an error and has to close” error in the background without you seeing much of it.

If you however try again and you are lucky, the mouse arrow appears and you are lucky and can play the game. The reason all this is happening is, it tries to initialize the intro of the game which fails, and after 4 times of trying, the game appears to give up on trying and falls back to showing you the main menu instead.

However, if you speak German, it might be a better idea to get a copy of the game, as the game runs natively fine on Windows 11 24H2. Many releases however are without the CD Audio and then have the file “cdsnd.off” on them.

Final and proper solution for the English version:

It appears the Nice1-4.exes start the game using different directX compatibility layers, for me simply starting Nice3.exe worked flawlessly.

You can edit the “game.bat” to call this instead of the default nice1, then the game will also run via Steam’s Play button.

You can however get the Soundtrack for free on Steam as a separated soundtrack release: Have a N.I.C.E day! Soundtrack.

Info in English how to check controls, can be found in this post on Steam

For N.I.C.E. 2, I’d suggest using DDrawCompat as it fixes crashes when trying to initilizes the races and make controllers work as well! More in this Steam Guide.

Also for this, get the Soundtrack of N.I.C.E. 2 for free from Steam

This is a collection of findings by the press, by Saber / 3D Realms themselves and the IT press to allow you a better performance on old hardware and perhaps less crashes depending the circumstances for the newly released “Tempest Rising”.

First of all the used Unity5 engine is known to cause incompatibility to AMD GPUs when DirectX 12 is used, hence an option to start the game under DirectX 11 has been included as a start option when running the game in Steam.

Furthermore the latest GameReady drivers from Nvidia do have known issues to overheat or blackscreen in games in general (see more info for release 576.02 at the GeForce GRD 576.02 Feedback Thread (Released 4/16/25) ).

To use DirectX 11 in a better performance way and with – under some circumstances – fewer or no crashes, it is advised that DXVK can be used, with details how to place the necessary DLL files into the game’s folder in a Steam community post.

Since it does not tell you how to obtain the right package to take those from, and most DXVK manuals are written for Linux, an unofficial but detailed set of instructions for Windows can be found in the reddit post “A guide to DXVK on Windows“.

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If you are one of those people who bought Canabalt on Steam back in the times before Windows 11, you might be disappointed to experience, that the game no longer works in Windows 11 24H2, it simply doesn’t run, and the process is stuck forever without any error messages, whatsoever.

However, when emailing and trying it out, the developer actually made the same game based on a different code branch which does work in Windows 11 24H2 and can be downloaded for free from his website, as well as running a web version from canabalt.com, as well.

When asking why he doesn’t update the Steam release with the version that does work in Windows 11 24H2, I was told he might consider it, but it is a lot of work doing so as the code base is so much different from the version released on Steam.

What do you do when you above’s error message appears if you try to run the Alpha Polari’s setup program?

Answer: As right click “Run as Administrator” does not work, run CMD as Administrator instead and run the setup.exe from the command line instead! 🙂

For the longest time, calling internationally was super expensive, despite it still is in many situations when calling to mobile phones rather than “landline”, calling to the PSTN was never on the cheap side.

This changed in some places of the world, e..g. with call-by-call phone providers that would append in front of the country code, making calls to abroad from Germany really affordable at the end of the 90’s, and eventually for the whole world when Skype became the first mainstream and easy to use VoIP service, that also included Unlimited World subscriptions, even including some cellular destinations like China and USA.

In most cases, people would use credits top-ups for destinations not covered by the subscription, this however changes in December last year, when Skype announced, it would shut down manual top-ups of Skype Credits. For whatever reason, as of February this year, the function for auto-recharge if the balance is under a certain low, appears to have been re-enabled (for existing users at least).

The most prominent VoIP provider in Germany, i.e. “Sipgate” and their free basic option, was a real model to the change of the situation on the VoIP market.

It discontinued the free basic (German) – pay as you go via credit – model for new users

So what did I do when I wanted to call the Domain Provider Reg.AM which doesn’t use a Yerevan city coded number for their customer support line but a 60-premium number? I have tried out Viber by Rakuten, which seems to be a direct competitor to Skype and most preferably used in the Baltic regions of the world – plus they include support for calling those 60-premium numbers which are meant to be only dialed within Armenia itself.

Why would I even bother you ask? Because in life, especially when dealing with business abroad, sometimes they don’t reply to email or What’s App messages, then more often than not, giving them a ring in a traditional phone conversation is the snappiest, easiest, more convenient and sometimes even only to find resolution to a problem.

I find big shame in the new direction the major industry leaders for PSTN and mobile calls in the VoIP industry are going, it is not a good trend, and there is hope competitors who still put their customer first came to stay a bit longer or even forever?

All games of the series play considerably well on latest Windows 11 24H2, however 2 games require a little bit of care to get them working right:

Life is Strange 2

The problem here lies in the Auto-HDR feature: If your main monitor supports HDR, when Auto-HDR is enabled, it will try to “improve” the game by applying HDR to it, which will results in the colors being over saturated.

The solution to this can be found in this reddit post, as follows:

going into Display Settings -> Graphics -> Select the game you want to change Auto HDR for and hit Options -> then tick “Don’t use Auto-HDR”.

Life is Strange: True Colors

the game has some weirdly broken elements to it.
The DLC “Steph’s ‘Wavelengths'” has been delisted, but the link in the main menu to the non-existing Steam DLC remained.

Instead they added a scroller on the bottom to explain that the DLC is now a separated “Deluxe Edition” instead:

Also, while the game supports resolutions bigger than 1080p Full HD, those resolutions are not selectable if you don’t set a compatibility mode for the game .exe to ignore Windows controlled DPI settings:

Next Lemmings game thrown into the ring:

This one works fully after you did what I described, except I never got the music playing. And neither SFX. The only thing that keeps working are the Indeo FMVs

1. Insert the CD into your drive and install it. The CD has to be inserted at all times as a full install to HDD/SSD is not available.
2. During installation you will get if you have other games using Indeo video installed, getting an error about DLL conflicts of other versions already installed on your system, and it will be updating your Software list for uninstalling, but it will most likely not break or overwrite anything:
   
   
   
3. Install the patch to fix the bug of  level 11-11 (Tanks a Lot) is glitched. Water lemmings fall to their death and you can’t prevent it.
4. Download  dgVoodoo2
   Unzip the archive and copy “dgVoodooCpl.exe” along with the contents of MS/x86 folder into the “Lemmings Revolution” folder.
   
   Launch dgVoodooCpl.exe and set the settings like on the images below (make sure you added a new running instance / config folder setup for the game beforehand!):
   

Setup everything as in the above screenshots (except the Resolution should match yours)? Good! Enjoy the game! 🙂

The traditional Spanish point and click adventure game studio running a promo know for a bundle of all of their point & click adventures (minus “Yesterday Origins”), let’s look some at the titles which need some tweaking to get them working on your newest OS.

Let’s start with “Runaway: A Road Adventure” & “Runaway: The Dream Of The Turtle” .

Simply enable Low-Res graphics mode, as the default Hi-Res mode does display the games only in B&W.

Another interesting contender is “Yesterday“, which actually has been censored for the digital storefront releases of Steam and GoG, in contrast to the original DVD 2012 release which came uncensored when originally hitting the shelves, which unfortunately also introduced some sound bug.

Luckily, the almost 1 Gig that had been removed can be patched back in, more info about this can be found in the archived article of Steams Play Gamers.

Last but not least, beware of fail positives for the “Plugins” folder of “Yesterday Origins“.

For me it was Comodo Internet Security 2025 Premium falsely reporting the 2 files “MAU.DLL” and “dbdata.exe” from the game’s subfolder “YesterdayOrigins_Data\Plugins” as malware.

When I restored them from Quarantine and added them to the excluded files list, the game ran flawlessly!

Back in April 2024, I have started my research on how to get Lemmings games to run under modern hardware and Windows 11 24H2. I did however halt it in favor of other pressing issues! Now is the time to resume it and write down my findings for the afterworld!

My research started with finding the wonderful RGB Classic Games Lemmings Page!

Especially the availability chart really helped me out big time!

Let’s start with:

“Lemmings Paintball” from the “Let’s Go Crazy With Lemmings” collection.

The hint from 11 years ago to change the desktop resolution to 640 x 480 is no longer viable in a world where the minimal resolution for Windows is now 800 x 600. There are more elegant solutions nowadays.

There is also no “No CD Patch” so keep your original copy handy when the desire hit to play this game.
Actually, the very viable DXWnd community broke off a whole discussion about running this issue, and despite research on this issue, stopped on  2022-01-16, there is a config available that does let you play the game stretched.

However, in Win 11 24H2 particularly, the solution is very finicky, as it does not work as soon as one of the avi videos of the game plays (e.g. the intro!) at which point the main window stays in windowed mode and only when the intro is skipped in the right moment and the missing permission dialog of DXWnd is prompted well in time, I could get the main window to run in borderless Fullscreen. It worked for me 4 times, after which it always resulted in one of the following two error messages:

The solution in Win11 24H2 is considerably straight forward and easy indeed!:

Setting the compatibility settings of “LEMBALL.EXE” to the following:

Next up is “Lemmings for Windows” from the “Let’s Go Crazy With Lemmings” collection.

This 1995 Windows release based on the original DOS release is installing and working just fine out of the box, it also scales nicely on my 2K screen resolution with no hiccup, nothing to see here, time to move on.

Hold on, there is one little thing: The online help does not work anymore as the .HLP format is no longer supported in Windows 10 and 11. The solution here is to copy the old “winhlp32.exe” from a Windows XP installation (as newer versions require Internet Explorer to be present to work). I took one from a WinXP 64bit installation I have on another HDD. Use Unlocker to rename the old Windows 11 version to something like “winhlp32.exe.bak” and then copy it from the root of the Windows XP installation to the root of Windows 11’s folder.

Next up is “Lemmings 3D“, this can be either the standalone version or the one from the “Let’s Go Crazy With Lemmings” collection.

This config is based off the latest DOSBox version to date, i.e. 0.74-3

Common places on the internet describe specific cpu cycles to be used for certain CPU speeds and using CD Audio in combination with General Midi.
This is no longer the case.

Instead, the currently best config for DOSBox 0.74-3 for Lemmings 3D is:

CPU Cycles=max
sbtype=sb1

In the game setup, select CD Audio = No

Any other config will cause the sound to stutter and the game to run slower than necessary

Next up is “Lemmings 3” from the “Lemings 1-3 neon edition” collection, also known as “All New World of Lemmings” in Europe.

This requires the same DOSBox configuration as Lemmings 3D above, quote:

CPU Cycles=max
sbtype=sb1

However, CD Audio cannot be disabled or else you have no music.
Take note, that the game has a long history of not running well in DOSBox at all. It is playable, but you will have some crackling noises during gameplay.

Next up is “Lemmings 1” from the “Lemmings 1-3 neon edition” collection, which unfortunately I could not get to work with working music, not even by lowering CPU cycles. It is a known fact that some versions of this game do not work with music in DOSBOX. It worked when I tried it with another version of the game!
Also, the official DOSBox has a graphic glitch after the main menu of Lemmings. For a glitch free experience, I highly suggest using DOSBox SVN DAUN instead.

As for “Lemmings 2” from the “Lemmings 1-3 neon edition” collection, the following sound config was required for the sound to work:

sbtype=sb1
oplemu=compat

For the game itself, it had to be installed and as sound hardware, soundblaster had to be selected for music.

for CPU cylcles

cycles=max

was required, or else the game would crash during the intro.