Putting together an old PC for Klingon Academy - Success!

Heatsinked

Heatsinked

Heatsinked

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After trying for months to get Klingon Academy to work under XP, Vista and Windows 7 using a range of different hardware and drivers... I gave up.

Last night I was rather bored and decided to build a new PC, using older components, Windows 98SE and legacy drivers. The spec:

Asrock 775i65G Mobo
2.53Ghz CPU
256 RAM (Generic PC2100)
Radeon 9600SE (AGP)

Surprisingly, I found Win98 drivers for the chipset (VIA 4in1), onboard LAN and sound. I grabbed the newest Win98 Radeon 9600 series drivers I could find. I also installed DirectX7, which is the version KA shipped with.

To be honest, I never expected to finish the build as I assumed there would be compatibility issues, resource conflicts etc. To my surprise, everything installed just fine with no issues. I ended up playing KA with various mods until 2am!!! Not a single crash or graphical glitch.

Sure, it’s not regarded as the best combat simulator out there. In fact, I’m sure many of you have no desire to play it again. But I thought I would post this information to help those who may be trying to get this game to work. I know it’s not an ideal solution, building a second PC to play just one game... but if you come across any other games that don’t work correctly within VM or modern O/S environments, at least there is another solution!

Best of luck!
 
Interesting, it's always something I've wanted to do. I just reinstalled Windows XP this past weekend purely to play Max Payne. It doesn't work in Vista or 7 (no sound in the comic strips). Does modern VM software like VMware support Direct3D now?
 
Shadez said:
KA is the best startrek game ever, i did manage to get my copy to run on XP but it was buggy.
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I did manage to get KA to run in XP and Windows 7 using Windows 98 compatibility mode but it was completely unstable and suffered from the infamous white-dot / firelag issues.

ic1male said:
Interesting, it's always something I've wanted to do. I just reinstalled Windows XP this past weekend purely to play Max Payne. It doesn't work in Vista or 7 (no sound in the comic strips). Does modern VM software like VMware support Direct3D now?
Click to expand...

Just did a quick google search:

"VMware Workstation includes experimental support for Direct3D video acceleration. This feature is not fully functional..."

So work in progress basically... I might just try it as I'd much prefer running a VM rather than a seperate PC! I tried Virtual PC 2007 but, as I found out later, it has no Direct3D support at all... just DirectDraw.
 
On the specs page of VMware's site, it says Workstation has support for DX9.0c with Shader Model 2. There is a 30-day trial which I am just going to partake in and see if I can get Max Payne to run inside it.
 
ic1male said:
On the specs page of VMware's site, it says Workstation has support for DX9.0c with Shader Model 2. There is a 30-day trial which I am just going to partake in and see if I can get Max Payne to run inside it.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the info! I'm just downloading it now... sounds promising! I have a feeling that KA will still be buggy though... it seems to prefer a genuine Windows 98 / DirectX7 environment using older hardware, specificaly, a DirectX7 / DirectX8 compliant ATI AGP graphics card.

Hope you get Max Payne working! Report back! :)
 
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I'm quite agog - I installed Max Payne from Steam. No issues there. On startup, I thought I'd take a chance and enable all options. The only thing that was greyed out was anti-aliasing. Everything else that the game supported was on high. Launch game. Crikey. It felt like it was running at 60fps. No slowdown or anything, as fluid as playing it outside the VM. Looks like I can happily go back to Vista now and Windows 7 in the future. I'll give it a whirl with something a bit more modern later.

EDIT: Will try an upgrade to Vista now. I hope it wasn't purely a coincidence that XP Pro was both host and guest. :(

EDIT2: No, works fine on Vista though it does feel ever so slightly more sluggish. Perhaps Windows 7 will bring it back to XP parity.
 
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Great news! I just finished installing 98 but I'm not sure how to go about installing a new display driver, as at the moment I am limited to 16 colours and 640x480... Any quick tips you can share? Cheers :)
 
Yeah, you have to install VMware Tools... I think you do it from the menu of the main program. It did it for me in Windows XP. Aye, you start up the virtual machine and then from the main box you choose VM > Install VMware Tools...

EDIT: I should add that DirectX 9 only works with a Windows XP Professional guest. So you may not get 3D inside Windows 98. But as your game is quite old, won't it work with a software DirectX type of emulation? I'm not also sure about sound in Windows 98 machine. There was a time when you have to download some ancient Creative Labs Soundblaster driver but whether they've changed that now, I don't know.
 
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Thanks for your help ic1male :)

I managed to get everything working except Direct3D support. Should have done a bit more reading before killing an hour trying to sort it out... The VMWare documentation states that Direct3D acceleration can only be enabled on guest operating systems using Windows 2000 and DirectX8 minimum, as of version 5 at least...

If anyone can prove me wrong, please do so!!!

Ah well, back to the drawing board I guess :rolleyes: :D
 
I've just read some of the manual - Windows XP is the only guest OS in which you can have Direct3D. This applies to the current version, Workstation 6.5. I can't see them ever faffing about to implement it in older versions of Windows, there just isn't the market.
 
SkeeterPSA said:
6 cds well iirc dvds wernt out when it was released and it has a lot of FMV so took up a canny bit of space on the cds.
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Tis true... in order to install and use the simulator (skirmish play), all you need is the first CD! :D You'll only be asked for CDs 2 to 6 if you play the main campaign.
 
Any chance of posting some screenshots, Heatsinked? Would bring back a lot of memories. I used to love this game. By far the best Star Trek game. :D
 
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