help with running older games....

[gmccall]

I have a few older games that I have been trying to play with no luck. They are Claw and Knight's Chase. They install just fine, but when I go to actually play them I get messages saying "Please insert game cd" (yes, these are the original CD's). I tried installing them on a few of my friends computers and they install/run just fine. The only thing I can think of is that I have several HD partitions and my CD drive is set up as "Z" instead of the standard "D" I'm not sure if I can change my HD partitions around so I can make my CD drive back to "D" or not... Heck, this might not even be the problem, but it's the only big difference I can think of. Any suggestions? Thanks.

 

[Dark4ng3l]

Many older games wil look for the cd drive in d: and if you cd rom is another leter you are screwed

 

[Lalakai]

perhaps you've already tried this, but see if you can run the game directly from the cd-rom. Usually folks install the game on their hd and then activate it from an icon but you can also run right from the cd.

 

[LuZar]

There is a way to rearrange your drive letters. Which OS are you using?

 

[Spiff]

There may be easier options than rearrangind drive letters which could get complicated.

Back in the day... to use drive letters for CD-ROM drives, you often had to specify a lastdrive= parameter in your autoexec or config.sys (can't recall which aright now... been so long). This allowed games to look for drives above D or E.

Many applications (games) set the the location of the CD-ROM drive in a configuration somewhere... registry, ini file, or elsewhere. check the games' folders for config files that you may be able to edit through a text editor.


The reason I say rearranging drive letters may be complicated is because of associated shorcuts, applications, etc... that may have defined paths to existing information on those drives you're rearranging.

So... start simple first

 

[gmccall]

Thanks for the response everyone! Tonight when I get a chance, I will try looking through some of the files in the games respective folders and see what I can come up with. Right now I have 5 hard drive partitions (C, D, E, F, and G because the Bios on my MB will not recognize anything above about 8 gig). Forgot to mention that I am using Windows 98se. If it comes down to re-arranging my drive letters, I will probably just do a clean sweep and install Windows ME, as switching drive letters would mess up about 75% of the programs on my system. I have been putting off installing ME because the system has been running very stable w/ no problems for months now, and I hate to mess up a good thing... At any rate, thank you for the replies, and if I find the answer I will post it here for future reference.