Uh, yeah. Seventh Guest and Eleventh Hour will *NOT* run under NT/2K/XP. Believe me. I've tried. Doesn't work. Won't work. Can't work. Uses too many stupid direct hardware interface calls. Hell, I had a hard enough time getting The Eleventh Hour working under 9x, and even then the audio on the video was all clicky and nasty. There was a port of the Groovie engine to DirectX, but I tried it and it, err, didn't work either. Actually seemed to work WORSE, but I'm not going to let you quote me on that.

Anyway, to summarize, it won't run, so stop trying. The end.

I got 7th Guest to work..I think it's the sound card.

Mine is an Aureal Vortex2 and I ran it under setting SoundBlaster..

It doesn't matter. VDMSound is all emulated. Unless you're not using VDMSound...

I'm running t7g using WinXP home and an Audigy Soundcard without problems. One catch. I downloaded a patch for running the program from Win95. I'll need to wait until I'm home (late tonight), but I can email it to anyone who needs it. If I can remember or find the URL that I downloaded it from, I'll post it here, but it was a tough patch to find.

I found the URL for the patch. The patched game does not need or use VDMSound, but instead uses directx. Make sure to read the readme file in the patch. Try:

http://begin2end.gitagrrl.com/downloads/patches/7thguest.zip

I've read of a similar patch for the 11th Guest, but I don't own that game, so I haven't hunted the patch down

The 11th Hour Windows patch runs waaaaayyyyyyy too fast. (It depends on CPU timing -- the same as OLD, OLD DOS games! Stupidity!) Does the 7th Guest patch exhibit the same problem?

I've only played a limited amount with the patch, but it seems to fun fine. I haven't noticed any speed issues. However, the cut seens are about the only scenes in T7G where an insanely fast speed might cause a problem. The cut scenes run at the correct speed. As for moving from one point to another, the faster the better as far as I'm concerned. Here too, however, the speed of the patched T7G seems pretty normal.

I forgot to mention the 11th Hour Windows interpreter also crashes really easily. 😉

T7G with the directx patch has been stable so far.

It sounds like The Seventh Guest is pretty reliable. Question is: have you tried The Eleventh Hour's Windows interpreter? *eg*

Also, moving this to Guide > Windows.

I don't have the 11th Hour, so I haven't tried the Windows interpretor for that game. About the only reason I was interested in the 7th Guest is because, several years ago, I was nearly finished (working on the microscope puzzle) when I heard a horrible grinding noise from the hard drive. I don't generally back up saved games, and I never got around to reworking all the puzzles to that point. I'm glad that if I get a chance, however, I can actually go back and finish the game.

*heh* Grinding noises mean double-plus FUN!

I have both of the games. Here are my experiences running them with Windows 98 and Windows XP.

The 7th Guest - Runs just fine with the DirectX patch.

The 11th Hour - Runs a bit too fast with the patch, especially the title screens. The movies play normally, and I could find no other issues with the game.

http://www.computerhope.org/download/games/t7g/t7gwinnv.zip

ftp.gamesdomain.co.uk/pub/patches/pc/general-patches/nos/11h242.zip

Banquo - your 11H didn't crash when trying to load the bookshelf puzzle in the library?

I have not played through the whole game since getting XP but I will try that puzzle and let you know if it works for me.

Thanks, mate! I'd be most definitely interested to hear what happens.

Also, does anyone know of a program that JUST slows down DirectX, and not the entire system? (I'm not even talking about eating up clock cycles like other slow-down utils do, I'm talking about making some call or something to DX to get it to slow down. But then, I don't know much about the DX API, so I could be way off thinking there would be a way to do this.)

I just tried the puzzle and aside from running too fast it works fine. No crashes anyway.

I also tried running it with VDMSound again but I can't get past the video mode error. These are two of my favorite games so I'll keep working with them and if I make any progress I'll post it here.

Snover wrote:

Thanks, mate! I'd be most definitely interested to hear what happens.

Also, does anyone know of a program that JUST slows down DirectX, and not the entire system? (I'm not even talking about eating up clock cycles like other slow-down utils do, I'm talking about making some call or something to DX to get it to slow down. But then, I don't know much about the DX API, so I could be way off thinking there would be a way to do this.)

heh. Turning on AA/Ansio would be the simplest way but for such old games I doubt it would even work. Not even sure if 7th/11th even use D3D...

I'm almost certain they just use DirectDraw and DirectSound, since all the scenes are prerendered and they need no 3D area.