Strange behaviors of old games with new runtime

[farvardin]

hello,

I've begun to play 5 days a stranger ( http://www.fullyramblomatic.com/5days/ )

I've tried to play in a virtual vmware windows machine (because I'm using linux). The games crashed at the beginning.

Illegal exception
---------------------------
An exception 0xC0000005 occured in ACWIN.EXE at EIP = 0x004A8F1A ; program pointer is +0, ACI version 2.55.560, gtags (0,0)

Maybe it's a directx issue ? ( but generally directx is working rather correctly, I managed for ex. to make Morrowind work in it... I could try to disable 3D acceleration, maybe it could do the job)

I tried, also on the windows machine, with the 2.72 player, I drag and drop the game on it, and it's working ok. But I noticed the background for the text is transparent, which make it impossible to read.
I've tested also on the 2.71 linux player, it was the same transparent background.

I tried the same on a real windows machine, with the 2.72 player, and the background was also transparent.
(From there the executable inside the game was working at least)

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=29767.0

?

[farvardin]

no, it's a different question. In fact, it's not a question at all, just a remark about the fact that in the case if old games no longer work with windows vista for example, and people try to run them with new ags player, it may be dissapointing if the API changed in a way it make them difficult to play.
On the other hand, I could also be a wrong choice from the author of the game, maybe it's like a transparent png which was black because of the limitation of the older version.

Btw, the crash in vmware was only because the sound was disabled in the machine...
Now it's working correctly with the original game .exe

[strazer]

The illegal exception is most probably caused by the VMWare environment and we can't really support that. (Edit: Glad it's solved!)

As for the transparency issue, I've read a few reports of newer engines causing these kinds of problems with older games. If you encounter them, it's recommended to use the same or a slightly newer version of the engine the game was made with.

So if you can get ags-v2_55_560.tar.bz2 to run on your Linux distro, try running the game with that.