First off, I should tell you that when it comes to games, I am perhaps the lamest gamer on earth. I gave up on epic scope games with Diablo II, which was around 10 years ago; they just take too much time. I’m what the industry calls a casual gamer; I like games that can be played end to end in under 30 minutes or can easily be dropped and picked up again a week later. So the most played games on my iPad and iPhone are backgammon, angry birds and various permutations of the match-3 games.
On my PC, my favorite game, the game I play every day is … Risk. The old board game. I have a CD-ROM by Hasbro from 1996 and I love it. If I could only have one game for the rest of my life, this would be it. Maybe not something I should openly admit to?
Okay so …
Yesterday I did some desktop PC upgrading. My C: drive was a 128 gig SSD that was constantly filling up, no matter how quickly or desperately I was trying to keep stuff off that drive. SSD prices have dropped so yesterday I picked up a 240 gig SSD at a price probably lower than I’d paid for the 128 a year ago. Of course this meant re-installing Windows and every program that I run, most of which I accomplished last night. But now Risk isn’t working.
Here’s the deal. A long time ago I created an ISO file from the original CD-ROM. (I’m not even sure where the original disk is now.) I used software to create and mount that image file as a virtual disk. It always worked fine. Last night, even though the only change to my configuration was the new hard drive, the game no longer runs. For the past few years I was using OSFMount to create the virtual disk. It doesn’t work now. I thought maybe as a result of their new version, but I still had the 2 year old version of it so I tried installing that. Nope. I tried all of the various compatibility settings, Windows 95 and so on. No cigar. I tried something called MagicISO. No good.
I don’t want to believe or accept that I am SOL in terms of this. (Though on the other hand, each game of Risk would take 15-30 minutes to play and a part of me thinks maybe I’m better off devoting that time each day to something more productive. Shit, I’m getting old!)
So if anyone has any suggestions on any other software or Windows settings I can try (I’m running 64 bit Windows 7 Pro), I would greatly appreciate it!
google daemon lite. it’s free. one of the best for virtual disk mount.
I used to use this but changed to something else for reasons I no longer remember. Just downloaded and installed it, it’s not working either.
Sounds like you aren’t having a problem getting the image to mount properly, but rather that the Windows 95 software won’t run in Win 7 64-bit. Right-click on the executable that’s not running properly, go to the “compatibility” tab, select “run this program in compatiblity mode for / Windows 95″. If that doesn’t work, try checking some/all of the other boxes in that tab, including “run this program as an administrator.”
Thanks Larry but I think I’ve tried those options already. And keep in mind that it did run just fine on Win 7 64 bit up until I swapped out hard disks and re-installed Windows. I’m wondering if there’s some registry setting or something in administration options that I set before and forgot to set now.
Did you try burning the ISO back to a CD and running it that way?
For really, really old games, try DOSBox http://www.dosbox.com/ but this doesn’t seem to be the issue. When you reloaded Windows, did you create a new user or reuse the same one – doesn’t OSFMount need administrator to work? Maybe a new user profile?
If the ISO image will not mount, can you not burn a CD from the ISO file and then run the CD?
ghost the old to the new hd.
Thanks all for taking the time to make suggestions. Just to be clear, the ISO disk image file mounts just fine. It’s that when I click on either of the two exe files, setup or risk, the arrow turns to a spinning circle for 5 seconds then returns to an arrow again and nothing else happens. Same results with 4 different virtual disk programs and in every compatibility mode. The game itself installs to a hard disk but requires the CD-ROM in the drive to run – 1990′s copy protection – but now I can’t even do the initial install. Philash, I’ll probably try your suggestion tomorrow if nothing else works.
Have you tried using the “XP Mode” that Windows 7 has? It’s not in there by default, you need to download and install it; maybe you had that installed before and accidentally nuked it in your SSD cleanup?
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/download.aspx/
Dan, I’ll give it a try!
And, suddenly last night, it worked just fine. I’m not entirely certain why. Here’s what happened. First I did the activation thing for the newly re-installed Windows. Then I went to Windows update, downloaded and installed all the updates shown for me. Then I shut down all the apps that were running so that I could reboot to finish installing all the updates. At that point, the setup program for Risk just popped up, started running, ran like normal. Following set up, the game ran just fine. And after the reboot, the game continues to run. So either some program or associated process that was running prevented this from running, or something that was downloaded and installed via Windows update put in whatever piece was missing so that it could run. Thanks all for your suggestions.
Get the Risk app. I play it on my iPad all the time its very cool. You can also get Monopoly. The one I miss is the original transport Tycoon, damn I miss that game!
I have ‘em but I don’t really care for ‘em. All that animation and crap to jazz things up just annoys me.