It may surprise, but actually, the game runs in Windows 10 and 11 but as I still have a PCI Sound card (because the onboard sound of my 2010 Asus motherboard has a buzzing interference sound (common for those cheap on-board sound chips back in that era and before), once you have the game practically running, you will be created by a blue screen “Driver IRQL NOT LESS OR EQUAL”.
Here is what I have done using the original CD release: (In my case from France as it was the only one available but the game still can be switched to English)
- Install Patch 1.2
- Took care of the copy protection issue
- wrote a batch file with a warning to first switch the main audio device and communications device to anything else than the X-Fi Xtreme Gamer to avoid the bluescreening happening because I forgot to switch that before starting the game!
- I reported the bug in the Windows 11 Feedback hub, perhaps it will somehow being care of in the future just like Driver: San Francisco somehow suddenly works in Windows 11 🙂
I am aware that the latest patch version has the copy protection removed (yes, they did that officially!) however I wanted to use a version reported to work in Windows 10 before.