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C&C Renegade crashes on Windows 98SE

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First post, by kapybara

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I can't get Command & Conquer: Renegade to run on my retro PC no matter what. Nearly 100 games I threw at this system all worked (eventually), except this one and I can't find any relevant info either on Vogons, PCGW or anywhere else.

Here are my PC specs: PIII 1GHz (Coppermine 133MHz FSB), 256MB RAM, Voodoo 3 3000 / GeForce 4 Ti 4200 (tried both), PC Chips M768MR MoBo with latest BIOS, Monster Sound MX300 (stock Vortex 2 drivers v2041)

And here's what I tried:
unpatched game (v1.0 EUR retail), patch v1.037, no-cd patch, reinstalled Windows, DirectX 8.1, DirectX 9.0c, using Voodoo 3 (driver V1.07.00), using Geforce 4 (drivers v41.09), taking out the sound card.

The result was the same in all cases - "invalid page fault in module GAME.EXE" after launching the game, not even the intro movie starts playing. The installer (which also plays movies and renders 3D stuff) worked fine. 🤔
To add insult to injury, the installed game worked on my regular Windows 10 PC, lol.

Has anyone experienced this? Any luck with getting it to run?

Reply 1 of 9, by elszgensa

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Have you tried the demo version? If only to rule out issues with SafeDisc, since even the no-cd cracks might have remnants of that left in.

Reply 2 of 9, by kapybara

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Just tried the multiplayer demo and got the same error, unfortunately.

Reply 3 of 9, by Garrett W

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Have you installed any unofficial Service Packs to your Win98SE installation?

Reply 4 of 9, by kapybara

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No, it's plain Win98SE English. Besides the drivers and DirectX, the only extra system component I can think of is the USB drive support nusb36e and Daemon Tools 3.47.

Reply 5 of 9, by kapybara

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I tried installing NUSB and Daemon Tools in a PCEm VM, where the game ran and either didn't affect it. Vortex and GeForce drivers refused to install without the hardware, so I couldn't test those. However, one possible culprit could be that the VM has Win98 with the default US codepage installed and there's a central european codepage on my retro PC. Sadly, this setting can't be changed without reinstalling the entire system.

Reply 6 of 9, by Garrett W

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That's a good catch and perhaps it's the culprit. I would also perhaps try uninstalling Vortex's drivers, though removing it should be enough.

Reply 7 of 9, by kapybara

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After trying many different combinations of things, I finally figured out what the issue was.

When installing Win98, I didn't tick the box with "Communications" components. Renegade crashes without them. 🤦‍♂️

The components can be easily installed via Add/Remove Programs in the Control Panel.

Reply 8 of 9, by eddman

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Project Eden has a similar issue. If "Dial-Up Networking" is not installed, the game throws an error at launch, asking for "SVRAPI.DLL".

Reply 9 of 9, by elszgensa

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Well at least that's a proper error message, as opposed to C&C:R's page faulting with zero info regarding the cause.

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