Is it actually a Windows program?

Yep. The requirements as listed in the game manual are as folows:

Pentium 60MHz w/16MB of RAM
2x Cd-Rom drive
16-bit (64K) color display
Sound Blaster 16-bit audio card or compatible
Mouse
Windows 95 <--
At least 50MB of free hard drive space

I know the silly thing works in Win95 or 98 at least because way back when I bought it, I did an install and test-played it a bit. It worked back then (I think right after I got it, a major game I'd been waiting for came out and I never got back to playing it), so I dunno if it's a speed issue or what).

However, I did a little bit of poking around today: it -may- be a quicktime or DirectX problem. The program wants to install DirectX 5 when the game installs. I currently lave Quicktime 6.3 and am unsure how to check what version of DirectX I have, but I'm sure it's much newer than 5.0 I decided to see if I could watch the cutscene MOV files that the game accesses on the disk (which must be in the drive to play) with a video program. Quicktime had no troubles with any of them save one: BLACK.MOV. It caused quicktime to crash each time I tried playing it. I know it worked in the distant past, as I said, so I'm wondering if that BLACK.MOV is the opening movie that the executable runs and, thus, hangs, and thus is my newer version of quicktime or DirectX responsible?

Kie

Oh, and in case it's needed, my system is:

Windows XP Home Edition (with that big security patch thingy they had last fall)
Pentium 4 1.6G
1G RAM (DDR I think, not sure)
ATI Radeon 9800 PRO w/128MB DDR RAM
Creative Soundblaster Live!
Direct 3D

Kie

OKay, I copied the cd-rom to my computer, replaced the BLACK.MOV with another video file that I know worked and burnt a new cd. The game now works, however, none of the movies will run during the game. The screen flickers briefly back to desktop and then returns to the game. So, I'm presuming my copy of Direct X/Direct#d and/or Quicktime is not backwardsly compatible with this game. The compatability wizard failed to help again, as did running the game in 256-color mode. Anyone have any ideas, please?

I realize this thread is very old, and probably the original poster is long gone, but nevertheless I wanted to post how I managed to get this game running fully, with videos and everything.

First off, I'm pretty sure that modern DirectX screws up the video playback within the game, this would explain why even on my previous 98 SE drive the game would run but not play videos. Since for any Doctor Who fan the brand new (for the time) material recorded for the game is the highlight of the proceedings, this clearly would not do.

Enter Virtual PC 2007. This is available freely from Microsoft's website. After installation, I began the new Virtual Machine setup wizard and created a VM named Windows 95, and gave it the attributes of 128 MB RAM. The system automatically defaults to emulation of an S3 video card and a Soundblaster 16 sound card. I then started the VM for the first time.

Then, I placed my Windows 95 CD in one of my drives, and selected the CD menu at the top of the running virtual machine window and selected the CD-ROM containing the Win 95 CD. Then, I selected the Action menu, clicked reset, it autodetected the CD, and I then proceeded to install Windows 95. Once that was done, I inserted my Destiny of the Doctors CD into the drive, booted up the VM, and went into the VM's My Computer, opened the CD, and installed.

The only other modification I had to make was to keep my desktop res within the VM at 640x480 and then, after starting Destiny of the Doctors, going into its Settings menu and changing the game's res to 640x480 (if you don't do this the playing field in the game will be the wrong size and cut off part of the screen). I also set the VM to always start in full-screen mode.

And it works like a dream.