I bought a copy of Riven from Ebay after reading that people were playing it in Windows 7.
It wouldn’t install so I did further research and found this program from Microsoft:
Now it runs without a problem, if only I could find a way to enlarge the view,
it’s kind of small (looks like 640x480, though I turned that off in the options).
Lowering my desktop resolution helps some, but if I lower it too much
the view in the game gets offset and I can’t see the whole screen.
Anyone know how to get a full-screen view on this Windows 95 game (in Windows 7)?
Oh, if you run this program (virtual PC) be sure to run it from Windows 7 as Administrator at least once
or you won’t be able to save your game, no permission to write.
Not sure about all the details of how it works, but it sets up a virtual drive and yes inside of W7,
beats having to boot into XP, if I even had it installed.
Looks like you can just minimize the XP mode to work in W7, so that’s pretty nice too.
Yeah it’s exactly like having it running on a windows xp machine.
I don’t know anything about Windows 95 games as I was 6 years old, but I don’t think 800x640 was popular until Windows 98, so I don’t think there is going to be much you can do. I remember the Diablo 2 expansion pack was boasting 800x600. As far as full screen, I have no idea. F11?
Which I’m sure you tried, sorry
No, didn’t try F11 before (have now) I think that is only browser specific. I can lower the resolution of my monitor to enlarge the view, but not control the position of the game window as I get into lower resolutions.
Yeah, it actually has a XP desktop, I had forgotten the look. Seems to run very naturally, I can check email and run other programs in W7 and there seems no disturbance between he two. Not something I’ve seen in windows before.
Riven is one of my favorite games and part of the reason why I began with 3d.
The resolution of the game is just 640x480 so going fullscreen won’t help exept getting a blurrier view.
I use the free VirtualBox http://www.virtualbox.org/ instead of Virtual PC and it works great.
There is also a free tool called Riveal that lets you extract all the images, movies and sound from Riven: http://homepage.mac.com/rshayter/Riveal.html
Pixero,
Are you familiar with the differences of the two virtual systems?
The extraction tool seems pretty cool, but for my needs it seems Camtasia will be sufficient, at least for now.
Thanks for the links.
I think I could easily raise the resolution of the game view x1.5 or maybe x2 and it wouldn’t look too bad, blurrier than it should, yes.
Wish I had thought about it, I got the CD version so I have to change disks on each island… ugh.
Forgive me for begging the point, but how is it better?
I have the other set up now and it seems fine for what I am doing
and wonder whether it is worth spending the time to set up the other.
I personally like VMware. I run Ubuntu and Windows 7 32Bit (for my 32bit Producer stuff) on my 64 bit Windows 7 Release. Runs perfect and the plugins they give you let you copy and paste from your main W7 to the VMware machine and a ton more.
I installed VBox but since I would need to reinstall the game I am using
and that is the only reason I am using it, I don’t see the point in continuing at this time.
The problem with the game view being offset when I lower the screen resolution
is fixed when I choose to have the display only on a single monitor, instead of the two.
So at least I can run the screen res at 800x600 and the 640x480 game res fills a lot more of the screen now.
I’ve tried using VirtualBox but keep getting a failure due to no bootable drive, not sure how to remedy that.
VB only seems to want to boot from the cd drive so it’s returning a fatal error, no bootable drive.
In the comparison between VB and VPC it was said to be very easy to set up while VPC was said just to be easy.
I found VPC very easy and so far VB is impossible. I’ve installed Amerzone with VPC,
but it creates an error in XP mode with VPC when I click to launch the game and compatibility mode doesn’t change anything. Guess I’ll look into the other one that was mentioned above.
