Question Problem running Cinemania 97, I know there must be a workaround!

[Muse]

I bought Microsoft Cinemania 97 at a computer show, yeah about 20 years ago. I still like to check it out sometimes with older movies. I install it on my PCs, which all run Windows. Microsoft stopped issuing new versions with the 1997 release, but they did have some updates, which I downloaded and placed in the versions I copied to my computers.

I'm using my new rig running Win10 64bit. Generally I just copy Cinemania 97 from my NAS to the local machine and run Cinemania.exe. I'm asked if I want to let the program alter Windows and I click OK. It doesn't scale, which sucks, but I can read it anyway and it's possible to copy/paste text from it, which I do sometimes.

I still have the CD. The CD evidently doesn't support installation but just runs off the CD! Whether I try to run it off my NAS (which I don't normally do) or from the CD, I get this error, even if nothing else is running:

Cinemania needs to modify the file C:\Windows\FONTS\msref1.tff, which is currently in use by another application. Quit any open applications and restart Cinemania.

Even if nothing else is open! If I click "Ignore" 4-5 times the program opens anyway! I don't get what's going on.

 

[mxnerd]

Right click the program exe file and run with administrator rights and see.

Or try to run the program in Windows XP compatibility mode.

 

[Muse]

Right click the program exe file and run with administrator rights and see.

Or try to run the program in Windows XP compatibility mode.

Editing properties and setting it to run it with administrator rights stops errors. It still asks me each time if it's OK to let it make changes to the device (which is what I see on my other Win10 computers). I can live with that. It doesn't scale great, but it's not unusable. Played with it to see if a setting would improve the scaling but I'm not finding anything.