First post, by Alice
Hi everyone,
At this point I am terribly exhausted and rather desperate after trying for days to install Shivers2 (Harvest of Souls) under my Win2000Pro (SP4) (CPU: Intel Celeron 1GHz). This is a Sierra game that is supposed to run under Win3.1 or Win95. (I know this is not a 'very' old game so you might think this is not a subject for 'hardcore' Vogons, but anyone who has any idea and some time, please give me a reply, it will be greatly appreciated!!)
The whole thing is more than a mystery and I'm thinking about taking up the "Sherlock" middle name already. I have the original copy of the game, which I tried to install from the CD. The installation fails with a "General Protection Fault". I tried to install it with apcomp.exe, choosing Win95, and also Win98, but all I get is error messages: it just wouldn't run. After a day or two I realized that during the attempt of normal setup (not with apcomp), the program hideously copies the setup files and some dll's to my C:\winnt\temp and that is where it seems to run from. That is, if after each and every unsuccessful attempt I manually kill "setup" and the mystical "wowexec" tasks in task manager. Without this, all I get is GPF, or simply nothing.
New chapter. I kill wowexec and start setup from c:\winnt\temp. Setup runs, but tests my machine and comes up with this error message: "You have 176781 KB free memory (8832 KB physical). You need a total of at least 10500 KB free (12000 KB physical) to run Harvest of Souls. To free up some memory, close down other Windows applications and try again." So I do not meet the "physical memory" requirement. Now. I have 128 MB ram. I restart, and kill my firewall, antivirus, and other things, run disk cleanup, defragment all my drives about 3 time each, and start setup again. Same problem. I download RamIdlePro, a ram defrag and management tool, install it, and require it to free up at least 64 MB RAM. It does so. I run setup: same problem, same amount of physical mem: 8832 KB EXACTLY.
Now I tell setup to never mind that the prog won't run, install it. It does so. The game starts to run, but at the intro video the sound gets stuck in a loop and all i can do is skip it, even though the movie goes on. Since the game is full of videos the sounds of which are crucial from the point of view of the plot, this practically makes it impossible to play. Since I have the damn game installed already I decide to delete my c:\winnt\temp files. The game from this point doesn't even start, but executes errors or encounters problems and shuts down. So I have to go though the same process for the 100th time again.
The big mystery is why do I have (acc. to the setup) 8832 KB free physical memory?? I can do whatever I can, it just wouldn't change. Or is "physical memory" not RAM? What the heck am I supposed to do to avoid going mad and burn my Harvest CDs under ritual circumstances?
