Are you following the instructions on the Glidos site, including the use of a FULL-SCREEN dos window?

Tell me more of the symptoms. What do you see when you try to install?

I followed the instruction to the letter and ran in full screen as said,also ran dosdrv as instructed followed rest of instructions entering drive letter and typing install .exe and then nothing at all happened just got a blank black screen when i pressed the windows key I was dumped back to the desktop.

Unregistered wrote:

I followed the instruction to the letter and ran in full screen as said,also ran dosdrv as instructed followed rest of instructions entering drive letter and typing install .exe and then nothing at all happened just got a blank black screen when i pressed the windows key I was dumped back to the desktop.

Did you not even get a message something like
"DOS4G/W blah blah..."?

After typing the CDRom's drive letter, try typing "DIR" to
check you can see the files on the CDRom drive. If you have
more than one drive, it is best to use the first in alphabetical
order.

When you typed DOSDRV, did you see the VDMSound startup
messages?

What Video card do you have? Some don't like DOS fullscreen mode. There was even a set of nVidea drivers that would reset your computer as soon as you enter DOS full-screen mode.

I have another idea, but I need to try it here first.

Unregistered wrote:

I have unfinnished business and cannot even install the damned thing let alone play it

Did you confirm a good install of "Unfinished Business" by running it in software mode first?

Nicht Sehr Gut wrote:

Did you confirm a good install of "Unfinished Business" by running it in software mode first?

I think he's getting a blank screen when he installs, and he ends up with nothing on the hard disc to try running in software mode.
I've been meaning to write an installer; it just has to copy a few files off the CD onto the hard drive. Must get around to that.

Yes, I had this problem too.. (WinXP nvidia geforce 2mx). Although I can run Glidos and TR1 (looking splendid!) I couldn't install either. In the end I installed to my laptop then copied the resultant files over etc.

I think this is the nvidia vesa/full-screen prob again because Glidos fixes this but only for the game itself. There's no fix in place when you first install to HD, so the installer stops with a blank screen (unable to switch to the correct mode?). To get free of this you do as "unregistered" says and alt-tab or similar and end te task.

I've also noticed a pre-installed HD TR1 file set on the internet to download. No sound though as obviosly the install/setup fails to get that far....

Nigel wrote:

Yes, I had this problem too.. (WinXP nvidia geforce 2mx). Although I can run Glidos and TR1 (looking splendid!) I couldn't install either. In the end I installed to my laptop then copied the resultant files over etc.

I think this is the nvidia vesa/full-screen prob again because Glidos fixes this but only for the game itself. There's no fix in place when you first install to HD, so the installer stops with a blank screen (unable to switch to the correct mode?). To get free of this you do as "unregistered" says and alt-tab or similar and end te task.

I've also noticed a pre-installed HD TR1 file set on the internet to download. No sound though as obviosly the install/setup fails to get that far....

Thanks for this info. I suspected that this might happen for some people, and I'd thought about writing an installer, but no one before has actually reported the problem, so I haven't gotten around to it.

The failure to install stuff (as far as GliDOS is concerned) sounds like a lack-of-privileges problem. Are you running in an Administrative account? You should be. Well, to install at least. 😜
Anyway, yeah. That's odd. Paul, did you say that you COULD get it to install on your computer?
I guess you could always try upgrading your video drivers to 30.82, if they aren't already, but that doesn't make a whole lot of sense because most installers just use standard DOS-ASCII modes.

Snover wrote:

The failure to install stuff (as far as GliDOS is concerned) sounds like a lack-of-privileges problem. Are you running in an Administrative account? You should be. Well, to install at least. 😜

That's a possibility. You probably need to run as an administrator
for install and playing with Glidos because there is some copying of files on each run.

Anyway, yeah. That's odd. Paul, did you say that you COULD get it to install on your computer?
I guess you could always try upgrading your video drivers to 30.82, if they aren't already, but that doesn't make a whole lot of sense because most installers just use standard DOS-ASCII modes.

I can install okay, but I always run as admin. I did have one set of nVidea drivers that wouldn't do DOS full screen at all, but that was ages ago.

No, the install problem I've had is not the Administrator priviledges (I am he!) it's purely a graphics prob.

When I first encountered this, and before v1.18 of Glidos with the Vesa support and fixes, I thought the problem had been a DOS4GW prob as it always hung there. But nope, the Glidos upgrade solved this for the game itself. I then noticed (when I installed to my old and cranky laptop) that the setup prog uses DOS4GW too, so assuming it used the same code libraries etc, must also be a graphic problem.

I wonder how many people other than me are using Geforce 2mx chips at present. "Unregistered" hasn't stated which set he/she is using.

Nigel wrote:

No, the install problem I've had is not the Administrator priviledges (I am he!) it's purely a graphics prob.

When I first encountered this, and before v1.18 of Glidos with the Vesa support and fixes, I thought the problem had been a DOS4GW prob as it always hung there. But nope, the Glidos upgrade solved this for the game itself. I then noticed (when I installed to my old and cranky laptop) that the setup prog uses DOS4GW too, so assuming it used the same code libraries etc, must also be a graphic problem.

I wonder how many people other than me are using Geforce 2mx chips at present. "Unregistered" hasn't stated which set he/she is using.

Thanks for the info. This is the first conclusive report that that v1.18 fixes the GF2 problem.

The daft thing is though that almost everybody that could be helped by this are going to be stumped by the install.

A trick that might work: copy glidvesa.exe from the Glidos folder to the root of your C drive; start Glidos, but don't press the "Start" button; put glidos in windowed mode; start a DOS box
and type

D:
C:\gldvesa.exe install.exe

Obviously change D: to something else if that's not your CD drive's letter.

Might work. Might not. Depends on what VESA mode the install program uses.

Couldn't he just edit the INI file and set it to the location of the installer? heh
Seems like the simplest fix to me.

well so far cannot install tr1,yes I do get the dos 4g screen and the vdm sound screen after that when I type in install I get nothing or get dumped back to the full dos screen ,I have tied both windowed and full with the same result,I think it may be a video problem though,
I dont know what is meant by running in software mode????????

funny thing is I can run tr2 with no problems at all so long as I run the vdm sound and the graphics and sound is perfect.

my system is
1.8mhz processor
265 mg ram
cdrom on E:
dvd on D:
pc266 m810 all in 1 ATX with 64m sis vga
40 gig ata 100 hdd
17 inch monitor
a97 sound blaster compatible sound
64 mb agp 3d graphics

ANY help would be gratefully appreciated Thanks

Snover wrote:

Couldn't he just edit the INI file and set it to the location of the installer? heh
Seems like the simplest fix to me.

Nice idea, but the way stuff is done at the moment, that would cause Glidos to attempt to copy files to the CD.

Unregistered wrote:

well so far cannot install tr1,yes I do get the dos 4g screen and the vdm sound screen after that when I type in install I get nothing or get dumped back to the full dos screen ,I have tied both windowed and full with the same result,I think it may be a video problem though,
I dont know what is meant by running in software mode????????

Did you try my suggestion to use gldvesa.exe?

funny thing is I can run tr2 with no problems at all so long as I run the vdm sound and the graphics and sound is perfect.

TR2 is completely different. It uses DirectX under Windows, not Glide under DOS. It would be very strange indeed if VDMS was helping with TR2.

Glidos wrote:

Thanks for the info. This is the first conclusive report that that v1.18 fixes the GF2 problem. […]
Show full quote

Thanks for the info. This is the first conclusive report that that v1.18 fixes the GF2 problem.

The daft thing is though that almost everybody that could be helped by this are going to be stumped by the install.

A trick that might work: copy glidvesa.exe from the Glidos folder to the root of your C drive; start Glidos, but don't press the "Start" button; put glidos in windowed mode; start a DOS box
and type

D:
C:\gldvesa.exe install.exe

Obviously change D: to something else if that's not your CD drive's letter.

Might work. Might not. Depends on what VESA mode the install program uses.

Well to test for you I've just tried another install of TR1 using the above workround but it just produced a Windows error message - ("NTVDM.EXE has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.").

It still looks like the crashing of the installer is taking place when the prog is trying to change video modes. I decided to try changing your settings to full-screen instead, to see what happened, and that time the DOS4GW copyright message came up but then froze at that point, before the NTVDM message appeared.

Now that's what used to happen to TR1 itself before the latest Glidos fixes etc. (less the NTVDM message.)

Incidentally, if it helps, when I try running the plain installer on my Geforce 2mx/WinXP in windowed mode, DOS4GW comes up, the prog changes graphics mode to a full-screen but then goes blank and freezes.

Maybe "Unregistered"'s SIS chipset suffers from the same probs as Geforce 2's.

I'm going to have to write an installer.

If you have any drives that are FAT/FAT32, you should be able to use a "boot disk" (DOS/Win9x) to at least install the game for you. You would need to choose no sound card.

Of course, that's no help if you're NTFS only.

Nicht Sehr Gut wrote:

If you have any drives that are FAT/FAT32, you should be able to use a "boot disk" (DOS/Win9x) to at least install the game for you. You would need to choose no sound card.

Yes; that should do it. Can you not set up the sound card but not test it?