Dark Side of the Moon: PLEASE HELP!
 

Is there any kind of patch or anything I can do to get the text working in this game on Windows XP? The game runs great except for text. I can see NOTHING in terms of dialogue trees, etc. I have to blindly choose a text selection, sometimes out of 4 or more choices... It's not worth it. Games shouldn't be annoying to play. Apparently this problem affects the CD-ROM version of the game as well, though I am playing on DVD. Inferno over on Inferno's Windows XP Compatability List says: "For some reason during the installation process...The Text program for this game does not install. An OCX command line is missing. So, here is a plea to the "patch writers and gaming hacks" out there in the universe. If you can write a patch for or better yet already have let us other poor folk know about it!"

Is there a patch? Or is there anything else I can do to get the text working in this game? I have heard elsewhere that the newer CD and DVD drives go too fast and miss the text file or some such thing. I tried a few programs that supposedly slow the DVD and CD down, then installed, but still no luck. Any recommendations on a specific utility for this? Or any other ideas or solutions? Please, if anyone can help me, I'd really appreciate it.

Dark Side of the Moon
 

I am also having same problem with the game. No written text options. Did you ever have a positive response? or suggestion of what to do. I have just installed the game today on my Win98. I'd appreciate some guidance.

Dark Side of the Moon
 

I also noticed that I am unable to Save any games as I can't write a description for the save game. What a drag. I just lost hours of work.

The problem is not related to XP. It is inherent within each CPU. Or more likely each CD-ROM drive. Some computers can read and install the necessary font file and some can't. The OS doesn't matter. There is no patch for this bug, and SouthPeak gets very defensive and even belligerent if you call them to ask about it. Your only solution is to try installing the game on various computers until you find one where the font works. You have about a 50-50 chance on any given computer, whether Win9X or WinXP. You may also need to do the compatibility mode dance to get it to run on an XP machine, but this has nothing to do with the font problem.

You can write a description but it doesn't show up on the screen. I'm not trying to split hairs, the difference might be important, I'm not sure. Did you type a name and save your game anyway? Try to restore it. I know it sounds crazy, but it worked for me in Temujin (another game by Southpeak, apparently with the same font bug). I could only see what I had typed when I restored. There are no dialogue trees in Temujin, so the font problem is just a minor annoyance.

What makes you say it's a 50-50 chance?

I guess I'm on the wrong side of the 50%, sigh. I couldn't get either Temujin or DSOM to run on my Win98se - it must be the wrong kind of CD drive.

FGM

DSOM on XP with text!
 

It is possible to read the text on DSOM.
It's not easy.

I installed microsoft virtual pc (45 day freee trial)

Then installed windows 95 in the virtual pc.

Then installed DSOM, which also installed directx 5.

Start the game - Text on screen!. Able to name and save games!

I'm thinking that this has always been a directx problem, although since I'm running windows95 in a virtual machine, it is also running like an older, slower machine as some have said is necessary.

Hi, fellow adventurers.

I've been a long time lurker and finally mustered enough determination to register. :) The reason I'm necrobumping the thread is that I think I might have found a possible solution to the missing text problem. I've tested the game on my Windows XP SP2 with my two DVD drives (the ancient AOpen 1640 Pro-A and the relatively modern Pioneer DVR-115D) and it ran without a hitch. If anybody cares to test it on their system, please let me know and I'll explain further.

Update: Using DXWnd tool, I've managed to run DSOM in windowed mode, take a look at the screenshot. As you see, the game runs natively (no VMWare or VirtualPC) on Windows XP and the text is where it should be. As you also see, the game isn't especially fond of being forced to run in windowed mode. :D

Yes, please explain. :) I've been struggling with this just this week.

1. Download this zip archive. Inside it you'll find a file named riched32.dll. Extract it somewhere.

2. Open the folder where you installed the game, then open 'bin' folder and put the extracted file in there. If, for example, the path for your installed game is 'C:\Program Files\SouthPeak Interactive\DSOM', you should put the extracted file (riched32.dll) in the folder 'C:\Program Files\SouthPeak Interactive\DSOM\bin'

3. Run the game and tell me if it works for you. :)

Hmm... I've replied some time ago, but for some reason the message didn't go through - I was informed that it's currently awaiting moderators approval. I figure it's some kind of spam prevention measure, and I'm not complaining (okay, maybe just a bit), but I'm a little surprised that the mere fact of my going through the registration ritual isn't proof enough that I'm not a spammer. :) Well, as they say, "when in Rome..."

Great, it works! :) (and not even windowed)
What a coincidence you're posting this just when I run into this problem.
Thanks

I'll provide some details in case anyone is interested. The common belief is that the problem with the missing text in DSOM is caused by the game being unable to read text or some files not installed properly. I've run the game in the debugger and found out that it is not really the case - the text is actually there in memory while the game is running, it's just that for some reason it's not showing up. While examining the game in the debugger, I've also found out that DSOM handles text in Rich Text format and uses Microsoft Rich Edit control. Up till now there are several versions of Rich Edit and the newer ones, according to Microsoft, are supposed to be backward compatible with the older ones, but in reality it’s only true up to some degree. Now, different Rich Edit versions (read: different DLLs) are distributed with different versions of Windows. Rich Edit 1.0 (riched32.dll) is included in Windows 95. Windows 98 includes both Rich Edit 1.0 and Rich Edit 2.0 (riched32.dll and riched20.dll accordingly) and Windows XP includes Rich Edit 3.0 (its corresponding DLL is confusingly named riched20.dll) and Rich Edit 1.0 emulator (riched32.dll, which is in fact a thin wrapper around riched20.dll). DSOM loads riched32.dll, i.e. uses Rich Edit 1.0 (which figures, since the game was made for Windows 95.) I suspected that there might be an incompatibility between the Rich Edit 1.0 which the game was programmed with in mind and the emulator provided by the recent versions of Windows. So I copied the riched32.dll from my Windows 98 distribution to the game folder where there other DLLs that depend on it and you know the rest.

Also, there are three different versions of riched32.dll (can you imagine that) and only one of them (with the version number 4.0.993.4) is redistributable. Fortunately, the one that is also happens to be just the one that is required by the game.

The bottom line is that Microsoft is to blame for breaking compatibility and creating this mess. :)

Glad to hear it! :) Now, can you please tell me what CPU you have and which Windows version you're running?

Well, it isn't supposed to be windowed. I used a special utility to force the windowed mode on it so I could take a screenshot to present it as a proof of DSOM indeed running on XP with the text being visible. :)

It's an old laptop winxp, 160 GHz.

Thanks, HandsFree.

It would be nice if someone could test it on Vista or Windows 7. I believe it should also work on these operating systems, but I would appreciate if someone confirmed it.

One other thing worth mentioning. You might want to turn off hardware acceleration if you run into graphics glitches. It's not related to the dialogue text problem at all, it's just that the game is old and it shows.

P.S. I installed the game on my P4 2.40 Ghz Windows XP notebook to test it on a different hardware and apart from the aforementioned graphics issue, which went away after I disabled hardware acceleration, everything seemed to work just fine.

Fantastic Winterfury

After all these years of people trying to create a fix for this great classic game you have come up with the solution. Congratulations and thank you. I tried it on one of my computers that runs XP Home with a Pentium 4 3.00GHz and the game ran perfect with all the missing text visible on my XP Home. Kudos to you and you efforts. So many gamers have never had the chance to play this game because they didn't have an older computer or the know how to use Virtual PC.

Great work.

Let me add my thanks for your efforts in resolving this issue! That is some great detective work to figure out exactly what was happening with the text. I downloaded the dll just in case I ever want to try to play this game on a new computer.

Thank you, guys. I can't help but think that if SouthPeak used the time they spent brushing off customers a little bit more productively like, say, actually investigating the problem, the solution could have been found long ago.

I hope you don't mind Winterfury but I think your fantastic work needs to be spread around so those who could not enjoy this classic adventure know what you have done for them.

Including everyone here at Adventure Gamers threads have been started at Adventure Point http://adventurepoint.forumotion.com...de-of-the-moon and Game Boomers http://www.gameboomers.com/forum/ubb...tml#Post702917 to get the word out

Game crashes still. HELP
 

Bravo for the text fix, but now we have a fatal bug issue. I am running the game via DVD on XP service pk 3 and it crashes to reboot every time I play the Blackjack game with Kit. Also (since we can earn money thru slot machines eventually and continue game), when you get to the Gravity Dice game with Alberto, it crashes to reboot everytime as well. Please help me somebody out there. I love this game and am experiencing it for the first time! I have followed Inferno's compatability instructions to the T and have tried each compatability format that there is, but it still crashes. I am shedding a tear, feeling as if I am all alone in this mess. H E L P P P !! !!

I am not a computer tech and I don't know if these will work but there are a couple of things you may want to try.

First try reducing your Video Acceleration a notch at a time and try the game again. If after trying each of these with no results try reducing the Audio Acceleration a notch at a time to see if that may work. Hope this helps, it truly is an excellent game that has passed so many adventure gamers.

For those of you who have to disable video acceleration to make DSOM work, I've made a small patch which forces the game to use hardware emulation only, preventing it from using any hardware-supported features. The result should be exactly the same as disabling hardware acceleration, only the patch won't affect any global settings in your system (so you don't have to restore anything after playing the game).

The patched game dll is in this archive. Open your DSOM\Bin folder, find the file named xvideoio.dll and make a backup copy of it. Then copy the patched xvideoio.dll from the downloaded archive to DSOM\Bin

I recommend you use the patch only if the game doesn't work properly on your system unless hardware acceleration is disabled completely. Don't use it otherwise.

GreyFuss, thanks for spreading the word. :)

My pleasure Winterfury. I will also post this extra fix for those that need it.

BTW, I played and finished the game with your original fix with absolutely no problems.

Thank you again, GreyFuss. But I'm afraid that here: "an addition fix for those who had a little trouble with the above fix" you got it a bit wrong. It's my fault, I should have provided a better explanation. These two fixes aren't connected in any possible way. The second fix tries to solve a completely different and entirely separate problem. It's in no way an additional fix for those who experienced problems with text fix, it's a fix for those who have different (not text related) problems which go away after they disable video acceleration. Let me quote sanford from GameBoomers forums:

"Hi everybody. I have Win XP and I finally got DSOM to work correctly on my PC. Here's how: I installed the TEXT PATCH as mentioned. I also went to DXDIAG>Display, and disabled DIRECT DRAW. <skipped>"

What he in fact did was not disabling DirectDraw (if he somehow managed to do that, the game not only wouldn't work correctly on his PC, but in fact would refuse to work at all) but disabling DirectDraw acceleration. Well, the xvideoio.dll fix does exactly that. It disables DirectDraw acceleration, but it does it locally, for the game only, thus eliminating the need of executing DXDIAG, disabling acceleration, executing DXDIAG again and restoring old settings afterwards.

So, to sum it up: if you have (video related) problems which disappear when you turn off video acceleration completely, you might want to try the second fix.

I'm very glad to hear that. :)

You are right WinterFury. I have reworded those posts

This is awesome.
 

Okay I admit I got antsy and finally broke down (after 4 years!) and figured out how to install Virtual PC. I had problems installing it before and just got frustrated and gave up. With DSOM looming, I just had to figure it out and now it works through Win95 (VirtualPC) without a problem. Thanks for all your help, now if I ever want to play it again, it WILL work on my system. ;)

I just felt compelled to register and express my extreme excitement at discovering this fix. Thank you Winterfury for sharing this!

This has literally been an 11-year-old mystery for me. I happen to have a Windows 98 machine that could already play DSOM - and another South Peak adventure game based on the movie Wild Wild West. However, when I originally bought WWW in 2000, it would not play on my PC.

What I could never understand is why it would freeze with no visible text back then. I even tried another computer with the same results - both of which were running Windows 98. I emailed South Peak for help and they told me they were no longer supporting Wild Wild West. (It had only been out for about 8 months when I bought it from a retail store and took it home to play!)

Then years later it started working again on that same PC. Thinking I was going crazy, I checked it on some other computers - it worked on Virtual PC, but it still exhibited the same problem on any other computer running Windows XP or higher. So I always wondered why it worked on some Win98 builds and not others. (Even the same computer where it originally couldn't!) But I decided to just consider myself fortunate and, ending my vow to never buy another South Peak game due to their horrible tech support, got DSOM to install and play after that.

And finally it all makes sense. This PC I use was a Dell. I just pulled out the old recovery disc and extracted the riched32.dll file to discover it had a file version of 4.00.834.839. But sometime years later I updated the BIOS on the MB, and I had to buy a retail version of 98 to later reinstall the OS. (The recovery disc no longer recognized it as a Dell.) And so I checked the version number of riched32.dll currently on my OS and there it was - version 4.00.993.4. (The one Winterfury found to be the only compatible version of Rich Edit!)

So I just thought I would share my little discovery in case anyone wonders why these games run on some builds of 98, and in other cases don't - some OEM versions install an incompatible riched32.dll file.

Help!?
 

I registered to see if anyone could help me.... :frusty:

I currently still have the same issue involving Blackjack with Kit. I was able to find an entirely unrelated patch to allow this game to run on 64-bit Windows 7, and it ran perfectly fine, until said blackjack scene. I tried installing the patch, but blackjack (and everything else, all of a sudden) started crashing. I just reinstalled the game and I'm going to try playing up to the casino with the video patch again.

Here's that fix for 64-bit Windows http://www.visualtour.com/downloads/xp_fix.exe

This is great news.

This game has been on my shelf for a decade now and I just got it running again. This has been one of the games I've been most eager to play and now it works.

HOWEVER, I forgot about all the disk swapping. My PC is under my desk so it takes some effort to stick my head under there and switch DVDs.

Is there an installer out there? Kind of like there is for the Tex Murphy games or Black Dahlia?

So the text patch works fanatically, but I'm having a different problem. Playing in Windows 7 and the audio is clipping at fairly regularly intervals, which pretty much kills immersion. Has any one else had this problem, and is there any known solution? I thought it might be slow load times from the CD, but using virtual mounting software didn't fix the problem.

Of course, as soon as I posted that I realized the problem (needed to update my audio drivers). Thanks!

Oh, and Tuco - while I don't know an installer proper, you can use a virtual drive system (I'm using Virtual CD) to set make images of all the DSOM CDs and then set up multiple concurrent virtual drives. The game then recognizes all CDs as being loaded, auto-switched, and there is no switching involved (basically, it's like you're running the DVD version). A pain to set up but totally worth it.

I've reuploaded the video fix (patched xvideoio.dll) since the file I uploaded earlier was removed:
http://www.mediafire.com/?bm707wxoytg62rw

I've also uploaded the latest version of RICHED32.DLL (5.0.1461.82), the one that was shipped with Windows ME. It was the last 'true' version before Microsoft switched to emulation:
http://www.mediafire.com/?pokv5p07xqfx4p9

Actually, 4.00.993.4 is not the version of Rich Edit, it's the version of riched32.dll (the file which contains implementation of Rich Edit 1.0 control). Think of it as the build version. Both riched32.dll of version 4.00.993.4 and riched32.dll of version 5.0.1461.82 (for example) are implementations of the same old Rich Edit 1.0 control. The more recent build may have some internal changes and introduce some fixes and optimizations, but it's essentially the same thing. Well, at least it's supposed to be. Also, it's not the only compatible version. The version that was shipped with Windows 95 is also compatible, so is the one that comes with Windows ME (5.0.1461.82). Somewhere along the way Microsoft decided to switch to Rich Edit 1.0 emulator and starting from Windows 2000 (I believe), each and every Microsoft OS was shipped with the emulator instead of the 'real thing'. That's where the problems come from. Apparently, the emulator wasn't tested enough or Microsoft just didn't care enough to fix the compatibility issues. The bottom line is, only the 'real thing' is compatible with DSOM, the emulator isn't.

If it doesn't make much sense, don't blame me, blame Microsoft. =)

Thank you for uploading the files again!