aerisama

Stop the press, the game crashes again. This time at mission five (this is 10+ hours into the game so sorry for not testing so far). If a marine walks upstairs in this 2-stories high dungeon, the game simply quits. I believe this is a) due to pink horrors on the map, because there are rooms on top of eachother (though on mission 4 you can walk on bunker ceiling and go in it without trouble), c) because the upper level has all-black "building sight blocked" elements or d) because of the trigger which is released when a marine leaves the stairs. Done testing for now, perhaps try later.

I'm up[censored] this thread after spending this evening fighting with the game and it's quirks, and reading the thread through. I have met no other bugs than some very brief palette blinking, the overlapping/prematurely cut off sound samples and the infamous "chaos cultists crash the game" -bug, and the fact the game needs a compatibility mode. What strikes me as funny, is that I remember the game constantly crashing on me when I tried it a few years ago the last time (using Win2K). While originally installing the game this time around, it didn't have the cultist bug, however uninstalling the game and reinstalling it to another directory introduced the bug once again. A further uninstall/reinstall to the original "functional" directory upheld the bug, leading me to believe it is due to a fatal change the game creates in Windows registry. There's potential in researching this, in case someone stumbling on this thread has a "virginous" OS under him and happens to know how to take and compare system snapshots of registry changes before and after a) installing the game, playing and exiting it and c) uninstalling it. I already spent 5 hours on making the game work and can't be bothered to do a complete OS reinstall myself I'm inclined to believe other game failures on Windows 2000 are due to player using an unstable OS (sorry XP users), a normal Win2K with the latest service pack and normal MS updates doesn't seem to break the game any further. Thus, my quick, fast and dirty guide in making the game playable on at least win2K (also referencing anole328, who originally discovered the WeapDef solution): a) Right click on your desktop -> Properties -> Settings -> Advanced -> Troubleshooting and set your Hardware Acceleration to None - this might not completely eliminate graphics palette blinking, but at least reduces it to near-nonexistent. Open up Start Menu -> Run... and enter "dxdiag.exe" without the quotes. From "DirectX Diagnostic Tool" -> Sound and set Hardware Sound Acceleration Level to None - this eliminates overlapping, jittering or prematurely cut off speech in the game c) Enable slayerui.dll, and set the game compatibility to Windows 95 or 98 (XP users already have the compatibility option without registering the dll). d) Using WordPad, open up <your Chaos Gate directory>\Data\WeapDef.dat, use CTRL-F to find Laspistol entry, and change AP To Use from 15 to 50, finally saving the file. - this prevents the cultists from shooting and eliminates the following game crash. The game is slightly easier in the beginning, you might want to add a few Chaos marines to affected maps to even up the odds. - Why use WordPad instead of NotePad? NotePad might enter wrong line feeds in the file making it gibberish for the game. Similarly, ONLY SAVE AS PLAIN TEXT (this is the default option if you only change the value and then choose "Save" from File menu. The game should now work, though you should still save often to be able to survive crashes the game does every now and then (memory leaks, not sure if it's the game programming or the OS incompatibility this time). The info i referenced is quoted under. Originally posted by anole328: Quote: Ok, I found a quick fix for the cultist las-pistol bug in XP. however, you will lose some of the challenge in the game. Go into the "Data" file in the chaos gate directory (you may want to back up this file first) Open the "WeapDef" file using wordpad Scroll down to the las-pistol values Modify the amount of Ap it takes to use the pistol from 15 to 50 "Save as" and replace the old WeapDef file The Chaos cultists should no longer be able to use their las-pistols, preventing the bug from occuring.

Concerns most Sierra On-Line games released 1994-1997 for the Windows 95/98 platform. I have until now thought most of my troubles were due to DirectX incompatibility, but this is actually not the case (apart from some screen anomalies the few games I have seem stable). I'm running Win2K, so test results on XP would be appreciated (if you even had problems to begin with). So all-in-all, just a quick heads-up for people, who have had trouble running these. Most usual symptoms are: 1) SETUP.EXE gives "General Protection Fault" or "Integer divide by 0 during install" error. 2) Game simply crashes on every startup after succesful install (most often SETUP.EXE beginning to fail in unison, even if it worked before) 3) Game complains the game CD is not in the drive, and refuses to run/continue (or movies/music don't play) Here's what you do: I) delete the SIERRA.INI file from your system directory. Do a search for "sierra" on your system drive, and remove the .INI file. II) Start SETUP.EXE and run the installation. SAY NO TO SYSTEM TEST! Continue when asked to confirm, the installation should now finish. III) Find the new SIERRA.INI created under your system directory and open it. Find the [Config] heading, or if it's missing completely, adding it to the bottom of the file. Add CDRomDrives and CDROM parameters under it, so it will look like this ("X" being the CD-ROM drive letter you're using for the game): [Config] CDRomDrives=X CDROM=4 IV) There is another .INI under your game directory, most likely resembling the game executable name. You should see a reference similar to SIERRA.INI just now: [Config] CDDrive=X WindowsDir=Y:\WINDIR Simply verify (and change if applicable) that "X" refers to your CD-ROM drive (needs to be the same as in SIERRA.INI), and that "Y:\WINDIR" truly refers to your Windows directory (ie. where SIERRA.INI resides). V) And for the last thing before running the game, change your color mode to 256 colors. It helps So that's it. So far I have Lords of the Realm II and Incredible Machine 3.0 running with ease. I believe this should get 90-100% of Sierra's '95-'98 (DX3-DX5) published games working, but I'm running out of games So if you own any old Sierra stuff, do test this and post your results here. Apart from this subject, I'm really annoyed you can't edit your own contributions for ntcompatible.com, because doing one one star contribution, and one five star immediately after means the site shows the game's success average wrong. Also, as this applies to a huge amount of games, perhaps the site admins could do some kind of a mass update on these games, if other people gain success with this method. .a