"fredskis" wrote in message ...

Hi all. I have been trying to get Dungeon Keeper working with Vista for
a couple of days.
I think I'm onto something but am not really sure what yet so just bare
with me...

On my desktop (Vista Ultimate x64) I get the problem of DK crashing
after the splash screen with a black 640*480 box and no error messages.
I installed it in a 98SE virtual machine using VMWare and it runs well
except the cursor randowly snaps to edges and renders the game pretty
unplayable as selecting anything becomes a very tedious chore.
I also installed it on Microsoft Virtual PC and as on Vista it would
crash after the splash screen.
I was going to install it on an old system running Windows 98SE
natively but while doing so decided to try one last thing...
I installed DK on my laptop (also running Vista Ultimate x64) and voila
it worked! Unfortunately the Direct3d won't work but for some reason it
works on there.
Now for the weird part...
I brought my laptop home from my girlfriend's place and tried playing
on my desktop's monitor but got the same error of crash at splash.
Puzzled I realised that the only change was the resolution, i turned it
back down to the laptop's 1440*900 from 1680*1050 and it worked.
Excitedly I tried this on my desktop but unfortunately it did not work


Now the only thing I can think of being different between these two
machines other than the hardware would be Service Pack 1. However, this
problem, as I understand, has been occurring to others since before it
was released.

If anyone can get it running, what are their system specs?

My laptop is:
Dell Inspiron 6400
Core 2 Duo processor 2Ghz
2GB RAM
NVidia 7300Go
1440*900 resolution

Desktop:
Gigabyte EX38-DS4
Intel E6600
4GB generic RAM
NVidia 8800GTS G92
1680*1050 resolution

I can't believe so many people still play DK 1. Do you play the Deeper Dungeons expansion?

You may be on to something with the resolution, older DirectX games would sometimes have "trouble" changing resolutions in games. The workaround was to set your computer to the same resolution/color depth that the game runs in.

So if DK runs in 640x480x256 colors, set your desktop to 640x480x256 (8-bit) color, and try the game again.

Oh wait, Vista only goes down to 800x600. Well maybe DK runs in 800x600.

DOSBox buddy, a friend to classic games everywhere.

-A.