Found a link to it using Google Groups. Sounds similar to Second Conflict except much larger. I'll give it a look over.

thanks 😀 all I could find out was it used visual basic 3 (vbrun300.dll)

the game had some really innovative features that are not used even now such as the communications if your out of FTL relay range the signal goes at light speed and such and units take time to change orders etc.

If I'm not mistaken, all VB3 applications were 16-bit. Perhaps you could run it under DOSBox with Windows 3.11? Or maybe even Virtual PC ?

Poking around with Filemon from http://www.sysinternals.com can sometimes be informative.

seems kinda silly to install an entire OS just to run one game... I know it ran under win98 but I'm not sure if it might not be the speed of my system (3Ghz) or the HT cpu or what 😒

also I don't have win 3.11 hehe... do have 98 somewhere. probably even 95 if I really hunt through the rubble. 😉

was hoping to find a way to run it with some form of wrapper. I've tried the compatibility modes built into XP with no results. I know some kinds of programs seem to ignore compatibility and run in XP mode regardless of what you set the compat too.

BTW last time I ran it I was using a 1.4Ghz machine with win98 and fat32 drives of 80G size... now I have winXP 3Ghz cpu w/HT and 250G HD 😒 old machine is long gone tho.

If you really think speed is an issue, then you are no doubt aware that there are many quality CPU-throttling programs available. (Throttle, for instance.)

I guess speed wasn't the issue... with the slowdown at least I get to see that it's failing at the loading stage though so perhaps it's the NTFS causing problems... seems doubtful but it's been a problem before 😒

Pretty much the only way NTFS would be a problem is if there was some sort of access-rights problem, and you could make that go away by running the program as an Administrator.

Have you tried Filemon yet?

nope... not sure what that is actually... and I tried a ramdisk so eliminated ntfs... I'm stuck again... mostly I was just hoping it was something simple like that I guess... I'm not particularly knowledgeable about getting older games to run hehe... older DOS games are far easier to work with than old windows games since I have yet to find a windows emulator for windows 😉

heck for all I know they used some 3rd party mem manager for it and it doesn't like 1G of ram 🤣... I miss the old compatibility system... the new one took away too much power such as limiting the ram available and so on... wish I knew how to roll back the compat mode

Looks like a Windows 3.1 prog. Should work in Windows 3.1 in DosBox.

That's what I said. 😜

If you think too much RAM is the problem, then you should try Xteq RAM Alloc. Just allocate a few hundred megabytes of RAM and see if the program works afterwards.

I mentioned Filemon in my first post. Take a look, why don't you? The idea is that if there is some missing file (or some file whose location is different in Windows XP than it was in Windows 98 ), Filemon should indicate it.

Probably not a missing file. It's most likely a 16bit program that has trouble with WOW. Probably easiest solutions is emulation. I'll check the game out tonight.

no idea what filemon is... I'll try the mem alloc thing but I have a feeling dosfreak is right about it being wow since that program gets "stuck" and has to be tasked aftertrying to run xpace.exe... just noticed that.

sometimes it'll close on it's own but takes a few minutes.

unfortunately using win 3.1 isn't an option since I don't have win 3.1 (as noted above hehe) win95 I have but I am hoping to be able to run this without installing a second OS let alone an OS under an emulator under an OS 🤣... but whatever I have to do I guess.

BTW thanks for all the info so far... even if they don't work for this one I am sure the programs will eventually come in handy since I am addicted to oldies.

I'm able to get it running. Is there a certain part where it fails? I haven't finished reading the help file yet to really start playing. Still don't know how to start on turn 1, I keep getting turn 2.

Are you using another version, maybe? I got it from here:
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.pbm/ … b088d2d6adddf15
There's a link to an archive that has version 0.505. The alternate download link on the page itself gives version 0.602.

yah I have the 505 version I'll try the 602

tried it and it works YAY! hehe thanks... not sure about the turn 2 start... I think there's a wierd quirk but it's been so long I forget.