Anyone else attempted to play GTA Vice City since SP2 ?

[Ninepepper]

Decided I wanted a change of pace after endless Half-life2 sessions. But have found a perplexing problem. Has anyone else ran GTA:Vice City since they updated to SP2?

Symptoms:
As the summary states, after clicking the .exe (or selecting it through run->programs) the disk just spins. I get "spinning disk" icon that appears beside my mouse pointer but the game doesn't load.

The application does not appear in "processes" or "applications" under Task Manager when I alt+control+delete.

I have uninstalled/reinstalled the game and deleted all user files in "my documents".

Went through the registry and 86ed all keys to "rockstar" and "vice city" but still no dice.

I am not getting any kind of error message, and no visual response that it is loading at all.

My Vice City disk labeled "Play" is not damaged because the computer reads from it just fine when it is doing a fresh install.

Additonially, I have to reboot the computer to eject the CD because the drive will refuse to stop spinning on its own.

I've done a google search and others users have reported similar problems but I cannot locate any fixes as of yet.

 

[BlueWeasel]

I loaded GTA:VC on my brother's system a few weeks ago, and his system has been updatd to SP2. I don't know if he has tried to play it yet, but I haven't heard of any problems from him.

 

[sswingle]

Mine works fine with SP2. I use no cd hack though....you could try that.

 

[Ninepepper]

Don't know a lot about no-cd hacks. Isn't that considered a "grey" area in most terms of EULAs? Will it FUBAR my Half life and Steam applications? I thought I read somewhere that Valve went out of their way to make sure Steam would not run the games if a client had a virtual drive application on their system.

However, I suppose I could give it a shot. Any recommendations?

 

[Gurck]

I had this problem (not after sp2, but after moving the game to another drive) and iirc I had to go through the "documents and settings" folder, deleting VC stuff, to fix it.

On copy protection, yes it's a grey area.. personally I think if you buy a game, you shouldn't be subjected to the hassle and physical CD wear & tear of hunting it down every time you want to play the game. I'm against piracy, of course, but in practice copy protection seems to punish only legitimate consumers. If possible, I use no-cd game "fixes", which are generally small replacement .exe files, to do this. There are various websites listing/hosting them, one is megagames dot com. Otherwise (for games which use data from the CD, or with no working "fixes" out) CD emulation software such as Daemon Tools (free, google it) is the next best thing. It's a little more of a hassle, though an add-on like DaemonScript makes it easier once set up, and of course it requires enough hdd space for the disc image.

 

[alm4rr]

just make sure u rename your old exe and not overwrite it

 

[Ninepepper]

I downloaded the no-cd crack from the website listed in the thread and it worked fine.

Thanks for the help!