It's that time again

Every few years I try to load, and run, my old games American McGee's Alice and Dungeon Siege on post-Windows-XP systems. There's various DRM on them and, also, the compatibility might not be so good anymore. Although this Easter PM on Windows 10 ... it's doing better!

With the former, an EA game on the FAKK update to Quake III, the advice which worked for me is here. I used the fix file, and put the "Madly Enhanced" mod in C:\Program Files (x86)\EA Games\American McGee's Alice\Base\. Also I put these in the config: seta r_customheight "720" and seta r_customwidth "1280". Over the last few days, I got up to that Majestic Maze where I'd left off back in Houston in, what, 2009? Maybe even 2006.

The Microsoft game - which I tried Monday - is a little trickier. I bought it again in the middle 2000s but not for its own sake: for me (as for many others) it was the runtime for that famous Warriors of Destiny remake. That remake demanded the patch which I did, indeed, install. But in the whole Vista-to-10 generation(s), this sucker even patched liked to freeze up on me. The advice I got here was from Steam: run DSVideoConfig.exe, which for me is in C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Games\Dungeon Siege\, and set it up for my graphics-card without "TnL". Here I'm back to the stone henge before the crypts. Obviously I'm concentrating on Alice before doing much more here.

The unhappy news for Dungeon Siege is that, when I have the "Transmute" spell, after that henge bit I can no longer click on it through inventory. It throws an "exception" box and kicks me out. Might need to downgrade the height and width.

FIXING DS1 4/17: In these happy post-Alice days, I got to thinking - if there's a NoCD for one game, there might be one for another. Here it is (mirror #3 worked for me). It turns out that this fixes the freezeups, too - at last. Again: if you own the CD, it is yours to play, without all that SecureDisk / SecureROM hackerware, especially if the game is by Microsoft which company bans that nonsense in Windows 10.