Wizards and Warriors

txa1265 · September 14, 2015

redman5427 said:
Now Mike, if you got it to work with xp,please tell us how.

So it works and I could create a party and get started ... but it is on a 17" Dell XPS that has a crap battery (well, always did, but after a decade it is REALLY crap) ... so now I have to WANT to play on that thing ...

redman5427 · September 14, 2015

It works? That's amazing. It will not even start on my newly brought back to life xp machine that is playing everything else but Darkstone. I am getting the same message between the two about the Indeo codec not installed but I downloaded and installed the codec already and windows shows it is installed.

I looked into running win98 on Virtualbox but have not seen anyone successful with that approach and Wizard and Warriors. I was close to finishing it years ago but was interrupted by something else at the time and couldn't finish it.

It is nice able to play games again that I haven't seen for over ten years with the XP machine. I have 4 containers of old games that I just haven't been able to let go yet.

txa1265 · September 14, 2015

redman5427 said:
It works? That's amazing. It will not even start on my newly brought back to life xp machine that is playing everything else but Darkstone.

Yeah ... I have no idea. I hadn't gotten it to work in ~10 years, and had actually tried to sell it off (with a strategy guide I got when I bought it used way back when) in a yard sale last year but failed, and just decided to hang on to it this year. I had no expectation that it would work - especially after I was unable to get my old Toshiba Win98 laptop running (HD is cooked, I think) - so it was only a Win95 (HP Omnibook) and WinXP (Dell XPS) that I had left to try. Surprised

I suppose I should take a video of it running just for fun - maybe show people me floundering around looking inept for a bit

redman5427 · September 17, 2015

Well, after a few days, I believe you. I had an old xp laptop at work that I fired up and copy pasted the W&W folder onto a flash drive and then moved to the old laptop and, I have liftoff!

Sort of, I have the splash screen asking for the play disk and I never got that far with the XP desktop at home(the one with a Gforce APG card) This laptop doesn't have a cd drive so I am going to try to mount an ISO image of the disk and see if it works. Now I am fired up to play and finish it. My laptop is a Tougbook and it has a battery with 8 hrs of battery life! I wonder if it is working because of the onboard video card instead of the Gforce card.That would be sort of a reverse twist.

Pretty weird. I have been tinkering with Win98 in VM Virtualbox but didn't think it would run at all because Vbox doesn't support 3d games.

redman5427 · September 18, 2015

I got home and it now works on my old laptop on xp also.

JDR13 · September 18, 2015

redman5427 said:
I got home and it now works on my old laptop on xp also.

The one with an Nvidia GPU? I'm surprised you got it to work. I could never get W&W running properly in Win XP, and I recall finding out that it had something to do with Nvidia.

*Edit* Ah.. I just read your post again and realized you have onboard video instead of Nvidia. Is it an Intel GPU?

luj1 · September 18, 2015

This is a fairly decent alternative for Wizardry

redman5427 · September 19, 2015

*Edit* Ah.. I just read your post again and realized you have onboard video instead of Nvidia. Is it an Intel GPU?

It is. Just to update things from last post and last nights lengthy session, I cannot exit the town from the cemetary gate. I can come and go easily from the western gate but I think you have to go out that gate to start the main quest. Unless I missed a quest giver but there is not much from that first town. I did get greeted by the old man with the beard upon starting the game. I have tried to revert game data and start fresh but it won't let me do that either.

So, something is not working quite right.

Dark Savant · September 20, 2015

This is a really classic RPG title.

The game works on win 7/8/10 just fine.

You need to do a little tweaking. I will post the guide and all files you need to get it working on modern computers in a couple of days.

Dagar · September 20, 2015

Make sure to use the Software Driver, not D3D. Using D3D causes you to not be able to click on certain things.

Dark Savant · September 20, 2015

Funny thing. It works out of the box on Windows 10 64bit on my laptop with intel/nvidia graphics combo.

- Run setup installation file in administrator mode
- Install the game anywhere outside Program Files folder
- Choose Maximum install option in the menu
- Install 1.1 official patch.
- Run deep6 file to start the game

Set all graphics options to high and choose hardware acceleration with highest resolution and voila everything works including intro video and buildings in town.
I can˙t believe it as I remember having a hard time tweaking the game on Windows 7, including converted avi town files, graphics patch and even then the videos and hardware acceleration mode did not work.

Some useful files

W&W manual in pdf
W&W world map
W&W patch v1.1

Dark Savant · September 20, 2015

redman5427 said:
It is. Just to update things from last post and last nights lengthy session, I cannot exit the town from the cemetary gate.

Try to apply 1.1 patch

lostforever · September 20, 2015

Dark Savant said:
Funny thing. It works out of the box on Windows 10 64bit on my laptop with intel/nvidia graphics combo.

- Run setup installation file in administrator mode
- Install the game anywhere outside Program Files folder
- Choose Maximum install option in the menu
- Install 1.1 official patch.
- Run deep6 file to start the game

Set all graphics options to high and choose hardware acceleration with highest resolution and voila everything works including intro video and buildings in town.
I can˙t believe it as I remember having a hard time tweaking the game on Windows 7, including converted avi town files, graphics patch and even then the videos and hardware acceleration mode did not work.

Some useful files

W&W manual in pdf
W&W world map
W&W patch v1.1

Yay I managed to get the game to run on win10 as well. Now need to find out if anything else is broken once I start to play it.

Also have you guys cracked the game to avoid the cd check?

redman5427 · September 20, 2015

I did use a new exe get it working on my laptop that didn't have a cd drive. I had copied and pasted the whole Activision folder over from a flash drive.
I dont have the laptop at home with me so I am back to tinkering with the Winxp desktop with GEforce 6600gt card.
I tried down downloading the Indeo codecs from a different place but didn't get anywhere because it said my Direx has corrupted files when I ran the install for the codecs. I read up a bit more at The Ironworks about Wizard and Warriors won't work on anything over directx 7. Which, can't be true because you are running it on Win 10.

I am going to try to reload Directx on this machine and then redo the codecs. I think the common theme in people's success in running the game is they all have laptops.
Whatever that means

redman5427 · September 20, 2015

I also have another old laptop with Win 7, onboard Amd graphics and I am going to try that

Dark Savant · September 20, 2015

lostforever said:
Also have you guys cracked the game to avoid the cd check?

There shouldn`t be any cd check after you install 1.1 patch or?

redman5427 said:
I think the common theme in people's success in running the game is they all have laptops.
Whatever that means

It has something to do with the graphics card. If I run it on integrated Intel card it runs smooth enough but if I choose dedicated nvidia graphics it is almost unplayable, very sluggish.

lostforever · September 20, 2015

Dark Savant said:
There shouldn`t be any cd check after you install 1.1 patch or?

It has something to do with the graphics card. If I run it on integrated Intel card it runs smooth enough but if I choose dedicated nvidia graphics it is almost unplayable, very sluggish.

can you give proper link to the 1.1 patch pls? the link the post above does not work. thanks.

Shagnak · September 21, 2015

redman5427 said:
Just to update things from last post and last nights lengthy session, I cannot exit the town from the cemetary gate.

Is it anything to do with this that I mentioned earlier?:

From the last time I did it on WinXP, you'll have to reprocess the video files/masks, or else the town hubs will not work 100% properly.

To be more specific, I had to turn them into uncompressed video (using something like Avidemux or Virtualdub).
Without that, lots of things in the towns would not be properly clickable, including some exits (this is due to misaligning of the video mask and the town graphics).

Playing with the codecs didn't work for me, but reprocessing the video files did (and was relatively quick - you just ended up with much larger video files).

Shagnak · September 21, 2015

Solution I used way back when: (from Ironworks)

I see that Dark Savant indicates it is not required (the patch does something?), but if you get desperate, maybe it's worth a go in case something isn't working right for you in the patch?

6.1) Can´t enter buildings in town or exit through the gates
Problem: Your town*.avi files are compressed and won´t work in Windows 2000/XP
Solution:

Download Virtualdub. First, copy each townmskn.avi file to townmskn_orig.avi in the W&W\townavi folder. This takes about 4.5 MB of space, and will let you put the original versions back if you need them. Next, delete the original townmskn.avi files. Third, use virtualdub to open each of the townmskn.avi files. Save each file in Vdub with the "Save old-format AVI" option with a new file name (townmskn_new.avi ). You should see some strange graphics appear; you will get back a large 32MB file. Fourth, exit Virtualdub and then in Windows Explorer copy each new file from townmskn_new.avi to townmskn.avi. Try to play the game at this point; if it works, stop here. If it doesn't, repeat the process with the three townhubn.avi files. Note that this will require an extra 90Mb of diskspace for each set of three files.

Shagnak · September 21, 2015

As a last, here is a page with everything you might need, including the 1.1 patch (which is in no way "official" - it was created in 2012 by Jeff Ludwig. The last official one was one of the 1.0's):
http://www.jeffludwig.com/wizardswarriors/download.php

Even includes a dload link for the reprocessed video files, and the links all seem to work.

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