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BR Game & Windows XP x64 incompatibility report.

PostPosted: Mon Jan 23, 2006 2:04 am
by BR796164
Dear friends, I regret to say that the BR game isn't compatible with x64 edition of Windows XP.

Since I have a new computer (after living 6 years with P2 400 Mhz), with an Athlon 64 procesor, I have decided to switch to Windows XP with 64bit extensions. I was aware that it doesn't eat 16bit software, but since I managed to get all necessary 64bit drivers, and having on my mind that more and more 64bit software will be coming out in next months, I decided to give it a try.

Most of my old programs and games, even as old as 5 years, work quite well on x64, while others do not. Unfortunately the BR game falls to the latter cathegory. I put the CD into my primary CDRW drive. Autorun window has launched immediately, but as soon as I clicked on "install", a dialog window has poped out:

"SETUP.EXE is incompatible with this version of Windows. Please contact software manufacturer for 64-bit version of this software."

That's it. Yeah. I'm gonna ask EA, if they would be so generous to remake
BR game installer to 64bit version. *sarcasm*

So I'm gonna make dual-boot on my machine and install a classic XP or ME on my second hard drive. It will be useful for other x64-incompatible software and games I have.

Still x64 is a good thing, it runs nearly all 32bit programs and you'l notice it's performance gain in most newer games, during video/audio encoding and work with large amount of data. It also works very fast with more than 4 GB RAM. Not that I have 4 GBs of RAM, only one. :oops:

Thus I predict that the BR Game will have a similar problem on yet not released Win Vista.

Ironic thing is, that FALLOUT, a similarly old cult game, has installed problemlessly on x64 and runs like charm.

Cry and mourn folks. The moment has come when BR is truly a legacy game.

Well, that's the cost I must pay for being "cutting edge".

:(

PostPosted: Mon Jan 23, 2006 1:18 pm
by THX1138
You could ask an open source or indepedent programmer to make an unofficial patch. Something to downscale the processor to act 32 bit for the Blade Runner game.

PostPosted: Tue Jan 24, 2006 2:05 am
by BR796164
Better said, to rewrite the installer to 32 bit version.
From my laical POW it shouldn't be so hard, BUT even if we sucesfully install the game, we can only guess if the main BR Game executable will be working! I suppose the game is using 16 bit DLL libraries, optimized for Windows 95 and THEN we have a serious problem, because that woud demand tampering with source code, what's impossible.

I'll try to contact EA support to ask about this... not that they will answer me anything useful. :?

Geeks skilled in programming, do you have any suggestions?

PostPosted: Tue Jan 24, 2006 12:10 pm
by THX1138
BR796164 wrote:Geeks skilled in programming, do you have any suggestions?


BR26354 could probably do it. I'll ask him about it next time I see him.

PostPosted: Wed Jan 25, 2006 2:18 am
by BR796164
Thanks.

Richard, being a programmer, probably has some ideas as well.
Only if he'd visit the forums more often.

:?

PostPosted: Wed Mar 08, 2006 10:59 am
by Deckard BR26354
BR796164 wrote:Thanks.

Richard, being a programmer, probably has some ideas as well.
Only if he'd visit the forums more often.

:?


I am on 4 chat services most days - could always send a message via ICQ/MSN/Yahoo/IRC... :wink:

(Un)fortunately I'm moving away from Windows in favour of Linux - I don't really follow the latest developments on Bill's new money-making scheme, so I probably won't be able to help you with the XP64 problem.

Surely XP64 has a 'backwards' compatibility mode?

I'm gonna try and run the BR Game on Linux under WINE (a windows wrapper).

PostPosted: Thu Mar 09, 2006 2:16 am
by BR796164
Indeed it has support for compatibility mode and MS claims the XP32 can somehow automatically convert 16bit instructions in apps to installers to 32bits, but apparently this doesn't always work.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=896458&SD=tech

As I don't live with the BR game these days much, I've temporarily put this issue ad acta, but when I'll crave for playing it again in the near future, I will try to look for some workaround (not that I can do much about it, really).

Wait. Actually I can. Dual boot.