Adventure Forums - View Single Post

rennervision · 05-28-2011, 06:06 PM

I just felt compelled to register and express my extreme excitement at discovering this fix. Thank you Winterfury for sharing this!

This has literally been an 11-year-old mystery for me. I happen to have a Windows 98 machine that could already play DSOM - and another South Peak adventure game based on the movie Wild Wild West. However, when I originally bought WWW in 2000, it would not play on my PC.

What I could never understand is why it would freeze with no visible text back then. I even tried another computer with the same results - both of which were running Windows 98. I emailed South Peak for help and they told me they were no longer supporting Wild Wild West. (It had only been out for about 8 months when I bought it from a retail store and took it home to play!)

Then years later it started working again on that same PC. Thinking I was going crazy, I checked it on some other computers - it worked on Virtual PC, but it still exhibited the same problem on any other computer running Windows XP or higher. So I always wondered why it worked on some Win98 builds and not others. (Even the same computer where it originally couldn't!) But I decided to just consider myself fortunate and, ending my vow to never buy another South Peak game due to their horrible tech support, got DSOM to install and play after that.

And finally it all makes sense. This PC I use was a Dell. I just pulled out the old recovery disc and extracted the riched32.dll file to discover it had a file version of 4.00.834.839. But sometime years later I updated the BIOS on the MB, and I had to buy a retail version of 98 to later reinstall the OS. (The recovery disc no longer recognized it as a Dell.) And so I checked the version number of riched32.dll currently on my OS and there it was - version 4.00.993.4. (The one Winterfury found to be the only compatible version of Rich Edit!)

So I just thought I would share my little discovery in case anyone wonders why these games run on some builds of 98, and in other cases don't - some OEM versions install an incompatible riched32.dll file.

05-28-2011, 06:06 PM	#28
rennervision Junior Member Join Date: May 2011 Posts: 1	I just felt compelled to register and express my extreme excitement at discovering this fix. Thank you Winterfury for sharing this! This has literally been an 11-year-old mystery for me. I happen to have a Windows 98 machine that could already play DSOM - and another South Peak adventure game based on the movie Wild Wild West. However, when I originally bought WWW in 2000, it would not play on my PC. What I could never understand is why it would freeze with no visible text back then. I even tried another computer with the same results - both of which were running Windows 98. I emailed South Peak for help and they told me they were no longer supporting Wild Wild West. (It had only been out for about 8 months when I bought it from a retail store and took it home to play!) Then years later it started working again on that same PC. Thinking I was going crazy, I checked it on some other computers - it worked on Virtual PC, but it still exhibited the same problem on any other computer running Windows XP or higher. So I always wondered why it worked on some Win98 builds and not others. (Even the same computer where it originally couldn't!) But I decided to just consider myself fortunate and, ending my vow to never buy another South Peak game due to their horrible tech support, got DSOM to install and play after that. And finally it all makes sense. This PC I use was a Dell. I just pulled out the old recovery disc and extracted the riched32.dll file to discover it had a file version of 4.00.834.839. But sometime years later I updated the BIOS on the MB, and I had to buy a retail version of 98 to later reinstall the OS. (The recovery disc no longer recognized it as a Dell.) And so I checked the version number of riched32.dll currently on my OS and there it was - version 4.00.993.4. (The one Winterfury found to be the only compatible version of Rich Edit!) So I just thought I would share my little discovery in case anyone wonders why these games run on some builds of 98, and in other cases don't - some OEM versions install an incompatible riched32.dll file.