WC3 Kilrathi Saga version CD error

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I recently got a copy of Kilrathi Saga for Windows and have managed to get Wing Commanders 1 and 2 running more or less okay, but Wing Commander 3 refusus to run. The screen goes black for a moment, then a dialog box pops up saying "Application files could not be found on the local drive or on any CD-ROM drive. The game CD is either missing, invalid or may need cleaning"

I tried disabling my D: partition and moving my CD drive to the letter D, but it still didn't work.

I'm running Windows XP pro with directX 9c.
 
I put disc 2 in as prompted and that's when I got the error. I also tried all 4 other discs. If disc 1 is in it asks for disc 2. Any other disc in the drive causes the CD error.

I did dig up an old machine and installed Win98 (ugh) on it and the game runs fine there, but I can't get drivers for the xbox 360 controller. I'll have to ferret up an old gameport joystick, I think, or at least find a generic USB controller driver that works.
 
If it works in 98, then it sounds likt the discs are fine. Are you running in compatibility mode in XP?
 
Yeah, I've tried all the various combatibility modes in XP, none of them worked.

The Win 98 box is proving extremely frustrating. The game has now crashed twice and deleted itself from the hard drive so next time I try to run it I just get the installer instead. Plus I've got this great hulking old machine lying around the place that isn't of much use, so I still want to get the game to run on XP. I know it must be possible because there are articles on here about running WC3 on XP but none of the ones I've read have helped.
 
Unregistered said:
I put disc 2 in as prompted and that's when I got the error. I also tried all 4 other discs. If disc 1 is in it asks for disc 2. Any other disc in the drive causes the CD error.

I did dig up an old machine and installed Win98 (ugh) on it and the game runs fine there, but I can't get drivers for the xbox 360 controller. I'll have to ferret up an old gameport joystick, I think, or at least find a generic USB controller driver that works.
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Try copying each cd to a different folder on your harddrive. Use daemon tools to mount them as cd roms and then re-install the game from there. If that doesnt work, we'll need some more info about your PC hardware. make sure the wc3 exe is set to win95/98 compatability and not just the kilrathi saga launcher/ installer.
 
Now I can get as far as the intro video before the game locks up (Well locks up isn't quite the right word, I can still get the mouse pointer to show up if I try to alt tab away but I can't get any other windows up and the game doesn't respont to alt-f4 so the only real option I have then is to mash reset). Interestingly enough, after flipping every compatibility option on (Win 95, no theme, force 540c480, force 256 colour), it runs from my CDs as well. But I'm still no closer to actually playing it, all I can do is watch the intro. Still, that's some progress at least.
 
Mmkay, now that you can get to the intro, there's new things you can try. The KS video can be heavily influenced by your directx settings. Try turning down (or up) the directx video and sound acceleration in dxdiag or the control panel equivalent.
 
I have a pretty good idea now that the problem is being caused by Windows XP service pack 2. I ran the game on an unpatched laptop okay but the xbox 360 controller driver demanded that SP2 was installed. I did so and now the game exhibits the same behaviour it does on my main PC.
 
Removed SP2 from the laptop. Game works again but now it refuses to acknowledge USB joysticks again (I put SP2 on it in the first place to get a game pad to work with it. With SP2 the game responds to the buttons by quitting out of the movies, but then the game locks up at the menu)
 
Neither behavior is normal, so you can try fixing either one. You should be able to use joysticks just fine in regular XP. Can you configure them to be detected at all? Do they work in other games?
 
I managed to get WC3 working with both the xbox 360 pad and the generic USB game pad by turning off compatibility mode for the game. In Windows XP with no service packs WC3 seems to run just fine even without having to use win95 emulation. With win95 emulation on the game no longer registers USB joypads.

On a side note, it turns out the xbox controller isn't a good choice after all. The trigger buttons are the throttle which means you have to hold the right hand one down constantly otherwise you'll travel at half speed, and rolling is achieved by moving the right thumb stick up and down.

I can afford to run the laptop without any service packs as it's not on the internet and I only ever use it for the occoaisional DVD. I can't afford to run my main PC without it though.
 
That problem with the WC3 intro lock-up is pretty common. I had it myself and none of the usual solutions worked in my case and it was a big pain to fix. You got lucky in that regard.
 
Didn't really get lucky, it took 2 days of fiddling with hardware and software before finally discovering that it was SP2 causing all the trouble, and I still have no workaround other than to use a machine with no service packs installed.
 
One question to the unregistered user with the XP-SP2 anomaly. Do you by chance have a system with an Athlon 64 CPU?
 
cff said:
One question to the unregistered user with the XP-SP2 anomaly. Do you by chance have a system with an Athlon 64 CPU?
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Nope. The main machine has an Athlon XP 2800+, the laptop has a Pentium 4 at something like 1.6 GHz ( can't remember precicely off the top of my head). WC3 failed on both machines with SP2 installed and ran on the laptop withnout SP2. I'm assuming that it'll also run on the main machine too if I tried it without SP2 but I rely too heavily on this machine to reformat it and install an unpatched version of an operating system known to have lots of flaws.
 
There goes my theory what part of SP2 might be causing the error (data execution prevenion). If it also affects P4s I am out of ideas.
 
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