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While the game has been fixed for Windows 10 with a patch released by the developers in September 2023, it still crashes on Windows 11 24H2.

The first part of the workaround has been posted by Cíphęr廾awK on the Steam forums, while the 2nd part is based on my own troubleshooting.

1. Download dgVoodoo2
2. copy all DLLs from the ZIP’s subfolders 3DFX/x86 and MS/x86 and the “dgVoodooCpl.exe” from the root to the “game” subfolder of where the game is installed.
3. Config dgVoodoo2 according to this screenshot https://share.getcloudapp.com/qGuDyGmx (GIF)
4. – Under Config folder/running instance make sure to add the games location that you pulled earlier and make sure it is selected.
   – You want to make your changes to the configuration and then click on “apply”
5. Switch to the “DirectX” tab, and make the following settings:
   Particularly important is to disable the options “dgVoodoo Watermark” or else you have a watermark in the game, and “Disable Alt-Enter to toggle screen state, or else you will never be able to switch the game to fullscreen mode.
6. Set the following compatibility settings for “game.exe”:

This has been performed using the GOG release of the game, works for the Steam version as well, however:

There are 2 errors you will run into on Windows 11 24H2, especially when you run the game on “HD, 2K or higher resolutions”:

-MFC RESIZE ERROR
-“SWAT MFC Appliaction has to close”

The first is happening due to the mission briefing FMVs being in Indeo movie codec which is old and obsolete and no longer updated. Hence installing an old codec presents a security risk.
There is however a mod that can be downloaded, tocompletely replace them all with re-encoded versions that use the popular XVID codec.

Download the replacement movies from The Mod Database:

http://www.moddb.com/games/police-quest-swat-2/downloads/swat2-xvid-movies

The 2nd error happens once characters and weapons have been selected and you want to start the scenario!

ou need to skrink the screen.

It should look like this:

http://i.imgur.com/3OLvf20.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/GtWgkPN.jpg

After the scenario is successfully running you can put the window on fullscreen again and reposition and resize the elements within the window to your liking!

Credits for both fixes go to users Max Payne and Slippery_Jim_ in the Steam forum thread MFC Application ERROR

Despite the game itself works pretty well, the fmv videos have audio pauses due to the timing being set wrong in the DOSBox settings.

´The solution can be found in the GOG Forums posted by user Flash-Nine:

I post this for future reference of people who have this problem, because I had the same problem. After searching the internet, I found that it is a known issue that that the WC 3 video sound stutters with cycles=max setting, can be found on the dosbox compatibility page. Unfortunately, that is the setting in the GOG version.
Setting cycles to 70000 fixed the problem for me.

In November, 2024, Gog updated the game, hence the CPU settings differ a bit now:

cycles=fixed
core=dynamic
cputype=auto
cycles=50000
cycleup=10000
cycledown=10000

I run it on:
Windows 11 24H2
on a Nvidia GeForce 1070 Katana
on a AMD FX-8370 Eight-Core Processor@4.00 GHz

I also highly suggest using an analog joystick instead of a gamepad, as the thumbsticks have a different movement pattern (round instead of a rectangle), which means the deadzones are not correctly and correct calibration will fail!

To run the Steam version of the game, you need the following 3 patches:

• The SilentPatch to fix the memory leaks and crashes of the game
• The Autosave v2 mod to allow saving anywhere in the game (most reasons of failure in this game is failing to save when needed).
• The Widescreen Fix (Albeit it is suggested by community members to only apply it on ultra widescreen monitors as the game supports 16:9 natively, in Win 11 it will overlap if you minimize the game once or start the game the next time. With the widescreen fix, you can simply re-select a 4:3 resolution temporarily in the main menu and then switch back to your desired 16:9 resolution, without the widescreen fix, this will fail to fix the aspect ratio!).

How to fix the game:

1. Download and install the game on Steam
2. Download all mods
3. Install the SilentPatch (there is a .txt file with installation instructions if needed)
4. Install the Autosave 2 mod (do not forget to also download and install the mod loader from the same site, beforehand)
5. Install the widescreen fix.
6. Start the game for the first time
7. Afterwards you will receive two popups, one by the modloader and one by the DirectShow filter and Video for Windows codec:

answer the prompts in the following order:

A) modupdater: select “INI files: replace all and keep settings.
Then click on “Download and Install updates now”
B) ffdshow compatibility manager
untick: Report this exe file name via internet anonymously.
untick: Don’t ask me again.
Select: use ffdshow. (always)
Click: OK
C) modupdater: Restart Now

After that you can select the resolution as you please and all the other graphic options via the main menu. take notice about my comments regarding widescreen aspect ratios above.
Furthermore, enabling the compatibility setting in the properties of Bully.exe “Disable fullscreen optimisations” might help further improving the situation.

Also, you have to go into SilentPatchBully.ini and change CustomMemoryMgr=0 to =1 to properly fix the configuration.

They are several traps when trying to run Running Arctic Baron / Transarctica on DOSBox:

(as hinted by the DOSBox Compatibility List comments)

• When you copy over the files from the CD to HDD (because the Batch installer won’t work), do not forget to remove the read-only attribute to the files!
• The game will freeze randomly in the default setting of the DOSBox config. I do suggest to use a separated config file for the game. There adjust the CPU cycles from “auto” to “max” as suggested here.
• If you use the European version that asks you to pick a language, use the NUM block number field for this input!
• If you want to use a joystick, use a real analog joystick, analog gamepad sticks may not work.

If you need help to win the game, Scenario: how to win in Arctic Baron might help.

There is also an open source remake called “Transarctica Remake”.

Hint: As you cannot setup your details of where the soundblaster is located, it will fall back to PC Speaker if it isn’t where the game expects it to be.

To fix this, set the following values in your DOSBox config file for the game:

sbtype=sb1
sbbase=220
irq=5
dma=1
hdma=5
sbmixer=true
oplmode=opl12
oplemu=default
oplrate=44100

This will give you ingame music and sfx at the same time! \o/

These instructions of me are based on the Steam user’s Jeff Paine guide named “Fix MPEG/MIDI not working in Windows 11“.

I am just adding additional steps necessary for Win11 24H2 not mentioned in his guide.

The general difference between his guide and the additional steps I have added is, that 24H2 appears to behave quite different than earlier builds.

Preconditions:

• Make sure, any audio/video codecs or DVD players you have installed previously to redeem the issue as from other guides or comments from the Steam Community, have been completely uninstalled.
• Make sure the game files and registry entries are also in its original state. To ensure this, uninstall the game and reinstall it. (caution! Make sure, the Steam folder used has no spaces in its folder name, if it does, create a new one with the Steam Settings! (refer to the coder who fixed the game to work on modern systems in his pinned Steam community post)

The reason for the above preconditions are, because all necessary video and sound codecs are already shipped with the game installation and are inside the game folder but are ignored as Steam sets it to Windows 95 compatibility mode which means the game cannot access them, despite they are there!

1. To work around that Steam sets the compatibility mode for the game, we download Jeff Paine’s launcher from his guide
2. Open the game’s files folder and rename “OVERSEER.EXE” to “OVERSEER2.EXE”.
3.  then open its preferences and set compatibility mode to another OS like Windows 8 or so, confirm, and then send it back to “None”. Then confirm again.
4. Extract the files from the fix’s archive to the game folder.
5. Try to launch the game, you will most likely come across this error message

After that, the program will crash before you could confirm you would like to download it. Here, you can find the manual download.

6. run the game from steam, first thing you will see is the following prompt:

Be quick so the dialog won’t disappear, select “Use ffdshow. (always)” and make sure the checkbox “Report the exe file name via internet anonymously” is unset.

That’s it! Enjoy playing the game! 🙂

Now, once inside the game, we are hit with more issues.

After the intro and the cut scenes finished playing, we are hit with the following error:

Which simply means the Midi sound cannot be played, so the background music and speech is missing.

We fix this by going to the sound preferences of the game and select the fitting MIDI Mapper to use. Since I am using a dedicated Creative Labs X-Fi Xtreme Gamer dedicated PCI soundcard, I am choosing “Creative Synth B” (As “Creative Synth A” sometimes makes the game freeze)

Last but not least we want to fix the transparent textures issues, hence we set up within the game the following:

And for the Advanced Preferences, we set these:

Then we download the latest version from dgVoodoo2 and copy the following files as instructed by Steam user Below Zero:

extracted the following files into the root of the Overseer folder from the MS folder. I did NOT create an MS folder in the Overseer folder.

D3D8.dll
D3Dlmm.dll
DDraw.dll

and from the root of the zip:
dgVoodooCpl.exe

Putting the 3dfx (glide.dll) files in there as well seemed to break things, so I didn’t.

Then we set it up as written by user Datargnan:

opened dgvoodoosetup and unchecked all options about vsync and aliasing

Your setup should look as follows in the DirectX tab:

– Under Config folder/running instance make sure to add the games location that you pulled earlier and make sure it is selected.
– You want to make your changes to the configuration and then click on “apply”

Important:
Note!: If you are stuck at the “brain puzzle”, i.e. the cut scene wont play after implant removal, you need to temporarily disable dgVoodoo as described by user dlrdgm:

If you use dgVoodoo disable it for that implant removal cutscene/puzzle. In dgVoodoo-Setup DirectX tab check “Disable and passthru to real DirectX”.

It still occationally causes freezes while being in fullscreen, I decided to leave a feedback to Microsoft about it in the Windows Feedback Hub, if you wanna read or participate, find it here.

So, Resolution announced yesterday, that Broken Sword 1 Director’s Cut going to be delisted on November 4th, 2024, as can be seen in this Steam post.

So this also means the OST of the game and the original release of 1996 will be removed, as both where part of the Director’s Cut as a DLC.

While the Reforged Edition does have the original graphics you can switch to using the Tab key, it does not contain the original cut-scenes and neither the additional scenes of gameplay with Nico of the DC and the re-recorded audio bits.

However, on the bright side, I can report we finally did an interview with the dear Charles Cecil, for our podcast:

which can be listened to / watched at https://scene.world/brokensword

As Forza Horizon 4 is going to be delisted on December, 15th and runs a promo now with -80% off, until October, 28th, time to look how to get this classic run on latest installment of Windows.

I have noticed, there are some do and don’ts for this game.

Don’ts:
– don’t move the installation files using the move function of Steam. Instead uninstall it from the old location and reinstall it at the new location.

Do’s:
– You have a higher probability of getting the game to run, if you disable displaying the Steam overlay in the Steam properties of the game.

– If the game’s process in task manager is staring, stopping, restarting without using resources and stopping again, delete the file “TargetHardwareProfiler.dll” in the Steam installation folder of the game.

– if you still have issues, deleting the App data of the game (%AppData%\Local\ForzaHorizon4)

Mind you, Nvidia has better support of old DirectX than AMD GPUs, so your experience might differ.

on reddit and steam you can read a lot how the game doesn’t work right on anything Windows 8.x and newer.

However, when getting the settings right, this was not the case for me!

Note: I do have an optical DVD drive in my computer, so the DRM check for inserting in my Steam release, do not appear for me.

So you have to change 3 Settings in the Advanced Graphic options inside the game:

• Default is “Primary Graphic Device” –> Select your actual GPU
• disable “Incremental Rendering”
• disable “Animation Interpolation”
  
  

Bonus: You can apply a hi-res pack, currently, you just have to dig through the thread to find the right page, here the permalink to all the still valid downloads: http://forums.sierrahelp.com/viewtopic.php?p=97737#p97737

Just to clarify: There are in fact 4 “Hot Pursuit” Need For Speed games:

-The first: “Need For Speed III: Hot Pursuit”
-The successor: Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit II”
-2010 release: Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit”
-2020 release: Need For Speed Hot Pursuit Remastered”

While the 2010 release works fine on my system with Windows 11 24H2, AMD FX-8370 and a Nvidia GeForce 1070 Katana with latest Game Ready Driver (565.90, released October 1st, 2024), the 2020 release: Need For Speed Hot Pursuit Remastered” stutters and audio hangs and loops all the time.

I found at the EA Forums a lot of possible solutions, but not of them worked, except the easiest one by user “edalfb” which I will quote here:

I solved the problem. It is done with a very simple method.
1. Set the display mode to be borderless when you enter the game.
2. Turn on vsync and make max framerate fps 60.
3. Set your other graphics settings as well.
4. Exit the game completely.
5. Re-enter the game and just make the screen mode to full screen.

Now the game becomes very comfortable to play in full screen and it’s getting 60 fps.

Note: When exiting the game, set the display mode to be borderless and exit and make it full screen again the next time you log in.
You have to repeat this every time.

Íf you have a 2nd screen and you have no sound in the borderless setting, you might have to click into the 2nd monitor first and then click into the primary monitor again until the sound finally returned.

Conclusion:
As the Autolog servers are down, mulitplayer is not possible, but if you are fine by playing just the single player missions, stick with the 2010 release. The graphics are really not that different and resolutions up to 4K still work! (playing it on a 2K monitor myself).

Update:
It appears, changes in the system at EA made so the product key given by Steam when starting the Game for the first time is not automatically connected to your EA account, so Autolog cannot find your license for the game.

The Solution can be found in the Steam forums by user [BR] Hamm Mann:

Your CD key for the game isn’t automatically applied to the game, and the box to enter it into in-game is non functional, so treat it as a red herring.
Instead, go to the EA App website, log into your account (if you don’t have one, i suggest making a burner account with a throwaway email) and then redeem the key in the settings for the site.
Then after logging in for the first time, reboot the game a few times and you’re in.
(This also removes the advertisement for NFS World, so use that as an indicator for if you’re on the autolog or not.)

Side-effect: In the EA App, You might get a notification message saying “Your EA Play Membership Expired, but you can renew it”.

This can be ignored, as the game solely runs within Steam, no additional installation in the EA App (former Origin) is necessary! 🙂