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[bearcatcatcat]

Yes, I know that this is possibly not the correct exact location on
the forum to ask this question. It's not that I'm lazy or hasty, it is that I
am overwhelmed.

I am 59 years old. I'm not very smart. I am disabled by a crippling
emotional illness. Please show patience and kindness. Thank you.

There are a lot of "solutions" to things on the internet. That is the problem.
Too much information, and not tailored to the exact situation I find myself in.

Using Windows 7 64 bit Home Premium edition.
Ancient machine, HP p6710f, limping along.






Spent what to me was a fortune of $500 on a computer through Amazon, and it died within two months, and the company isn't replying to warranty service messages. Ripped off. Can't afford to do that again.....


download is Dino Crisis 2 for PC, from MyAbandonWare.com

I have zero experience trying to do this.

With difficulty, I used Winzip to extract the download, producing BIN and CUE files.

Not knowing what to do next, I used IMGBURN to try to turn these into ISO files.

This appeared to require the burning of a physical CD, which I did.

Then I tried to launch the game. There was a small icon for doing so, but it only loads and repeats the animation before game start, never goes to the buttons that say "Start Game"

Note also, that although this is the PC version, as stated on the download site, the images I saw were VERY blurry compared to my old experience.

I never played this on PC before.
I played it on a Sony Playstation One, many years ago.
Now, although it was somewhat pixellated on rough edges, and I was viewing it on a Cathode Ray Tube televison, it was not BLURRY as it looks on this computer monitor.
I think my monitor is LCD.

https://ibb.co/album/JnyMyz

https://ibb.co/9n4Z7sT




I then flailed around, utterly clueless. Deleted everything I thought related to the game. Downloaded again. Now, I'm getting a tiny box, with illustrations from the game, offering to install various things such as DirectX. I go ahead and install all the choices. Then I click "Play Game", which is an enabled clickable choice.

When I try to launch, getting error:

C:/Users/beatcat/appData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/GameExplorer/{a7b5a4a4-c2ca-4a4.../Play.Ink is not a valid Win32 application

Downloaded VirtualCloneDrive next, and it appears as clear as mud, makes no difference.

Could someone, please, for gods sake, walk me through this?

[zirkoni]

Getting old Windows games to run on a newer PC/operating system is not always the easiest thing to do, especially if you're not very knowledgeable about such things.

Originally Posted by bearcatcatcat

When I try to launch, getting error:

C:/Users/beatcat/appData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/GameExplorer/{a7b5a4a4-c2ca-4a4.../Play.Ink is not a valid Win32 application

No idea what this is, looks like a broken path. Maybe instead of trying to start the game from that "Play game" dialog, navigate to the game's install path on you hard drive and start the game's executable from there.

Originally Posted by bearcatcatcat

Downloaded VirtualCloneDrive next, and it appears as clear as mud, makes no difference.

VirtualCloneDrive is just a program that you can use to mount a CD-image (like that BIN/CUE pair of files) as if it was a real physical CD in your PC's CD-drive. But if you already burned the image to a physical CD and that works, then I don't think this would make any difference. (well, it might, modern CD/DVD-drive vs old drive, etc, who knows)

Originally Posted by bearcatcatcat

Could someone, please, for gods sake, walk me through this?

- I don't have Windows 7 so I can't test it myself
- I don't want to install some old Windows game, so I can't test it myself
- Usually just trial and error (and searching the Internet for solutions) is the best way to solve problems with Windows games

[Scatty]

As it's a 2001 game, it's likely that its targeted Windows version was Win98 SE, possibly still able to run fine with Windows XP, but Windows 7 is already way more modern, and 64 bit. That already complicates matters for old Windows games, which would be 32 bit programs, although often such games are still able to run without too many problems on modern operating systems.


First thing I'd recommend, is that you download & install DirectX 9, last version from June 2010 - here. Old Windows games are often having troubles with any DirectX newer than 9, don't know now which one Windows 7 has by default, 10?
You can have multiple versions of DirectX installed, so you don't have to worry, and DirectX 9 is backwards compatible to Directx 7, so it just might solve a few problems with Dino Crisis 2.


Now unfortunately I don't know the game myself either, but from your screenshots it looks like it supports only older standard resolution like 640x480, which would look very small on modern hi-res computer monitors. There might be a possibility to either set a higher resolution with the game options, or manually edit it's configuration file to hard-set a resolution to something higher, and see if it works. However, editing configuration file requires knowing what it's called, and is a bit more advanced thing, so I couldn't help with that.
If you can set the game to 1024x768, which is still an old standard for many games, that should already look bigger and more comfortable to play. If the game allows that, setting it to 1920x1080 would likely fit your monitor resolution, thus allowing to play the game in full screen.

[Smiling Spectre]

1. Check your link. C:/Users/beatcat/appData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/GameExplorer/{a7b5a4a4-c2ca-4a4.../Play.Ink is not full name, but I believe, you'll close enough to find it. I mean, manually, go all the way to GameExplorer, and check the dir that starts from this a7b etc. And check "Play.lnk" properties. if it's correct link, it must lead to your real game name. Proceed from there then.

2. In the MyAbandonware comments there is reply that they was able to go through cinematics with Win98 mode.

3. Check DgVodoo or DxWnd. Both can emulate _some_ of old DirectX games.