First post, by Gagster
- Rank
- Newbie
I have this very old CD containing the rare Windows 9x versions of both Aladdin, Lion King and the Jungle Book games.
I have struggled for many years getting them running on modern PCs; last time it worked was when I had a Windows 98 PC a long time ago.
I recently got a little bit progress though. Using dgVoodoo2 (2.62.1) and its ddraw wrapper while running Aladdin in Windows 98 compatibility mode with 8-bit colors enable, the game now actually starts on my Windows 10 PC.
I then get welcomed by the game in windowed mode, displaying a single color instead of actual graphics. Pressing Alt+Enter gets the game into fullscreen mode, and the dgVoodoo2 wrapper kick in and renders the graphics perfectly.
Now the game runs as smooth as it should, the sound plays OK, but the actual in-game music is not playing at all.
The game's music is stored in midi format, so all the games music is contained within *.mid files (in the same folder as the game). It seems like the Windows 95/98 compatibility mode in Windows 10 can not run the midi files in my setup, and the midi files is the main reason I think the Windows 95 version of Aladdin is the best port of this game (a conversion of the Sega Genesis port with just as smooth framerate, but with even better sounding music because of the midi soundtrack).
When it comes to both the Lion King and the Jungle Book though, starting the Windows executables (lionw.exe or junglew.exe) with dgVoodoo2 installed and the compatibility settings turned the same as Aladdin, the game window opens but a message telling "Can't open EPFS file" appears. I just did a clean install from the Disney's Classic Video Games CD, and the *.EPF file is in the games folders (I even tried renaming the *.EPS files to *.EPFS, but nothing happened).
It seems like this game compilation is quite rare; PC Gaming Wiki does not mention it at all, and most info about those games on PC and making it work is mostly about its MS-DOS counterparts. Thereby I haven't got much guidance online when it comes to run this game compilation on modern Windows 10 PCs.
I tried running this in some kind of VirtualPC software some years ago (I try every two, three years or so I believe), but even virtualization struggle while trying to play the Windows 9x ports of those games in my experience.
CPU: i7-12700KF
RAM: 64 GB
GPU: GeForce GTX 1080 Ti
OS: Windows 11