Hi everyone, I'm brand new here but in desperate need of assistance. After scouring the 'net for answers to these questions I have about getting this old game going again I stumbled upon this page which I believe may be the key to my discovering a solution 😎

I just came upon some old games in the back of my closet. In a fit of nostalgia, I attempted to install some of them and play them again for the first time in years. I was able to get two out of the three working again in no time at all (Full Throttle and Return to Zork, respectfully) however the third game (Dragon's Lair, circa 1989) continues to elude me.

Upon inserting the Dragon's Lair CD and running INSTALL.EXE you are first prompted to select a language. Upon doing so, the installer says it is going to create a boot disk and prompts you to insert a disk to use (no way to opt out of this step). Upon doing so, a DOS window pops up with the message:

After displaying this error for a moment, the DOS window returns to the installer program and states that you must now restart the computer with the newly created boot disk in the drive (remember though, no boot disk was ever created due to the error seen above).

Something that may or may not be of importance is that the CD contains two other executable files besides INSTALL.EXE. Also present are DRAGON.EXE and DL.EXE which both seem to be the files you would have to run in order to play the game. Attempting to run either of them results in the following error:

Note that the directory shown in this pic goes to my hard drive (C:\games\dragon) instead of my CD drive because someone suggested I take all the files from the CD and put them on my HD and try running the .EXE on the off chance that all the installer did was to move all the files to the HD as some of them tended to do back then. As you can see it didn't work. This same error message pops up if you attempt to run either of the .EXE's directly off the CD too.

If my memory serves me correctly, to play this game one used to have to exit Windows to DOS, change to the CD-ROM drive, and type in the word "Dragon". This was about eight or more years ago, but I am pretty sure that's how I remember booting it. The machine I had back then was a 486 and I think it was running Windows 95 at the time, though there is a chance it had 3.1 on it.

I am pretty sure somebody will post something about the use of the Virtual PC program. I have downloaded the trial version (this afternoon) and run it, however since I lack any other OS' to install onto my "virtual" drives I am unable to use the program effectively.

So what the heck can I do to get Dragon's Lair going again on a WinXP machine short of going out and buying a later release 😕