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Admiral Sea Battles - Unable to install on Windows 10

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First post, by Gorion

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Full disclosure, I have posted this question elsewhere, prior to discovering this wonderful community!

Hey all,

I have a stack of old original games that I have been slowly installing on my new computer and some install ok, some I have a bit of trouble but manage to find a way, and then there are some that I find impossible. Case in point: Admiral Sea Battle, a 1996 game. I put the CD in and then I am able to click on the setup.exe and from there I get stuck at the section where it asks me to choose the version to install.

See pic to see what I mean. Is there anyway to bypass this and continue with the installation?

Edit: Including these links for reference as the only other discussion/mention of this issue on the web that I could find (I personally want to be able to play it without the virtual box):

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/admiral_sea_battles_anyone
https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2157118
https://www.reddit.com/r/retrogaming/comments … _on_windows_10/

Edit 2: Removed abandonware link, sorry about that.

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Last edited by Gorion on 2024-04-04, 23:25. Edited 2 times in total.

Reply 1 of 5, by eddman

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Perhaps someone can make a patch for the installer.

What you could do is to install the game in a VM or emulator and see which files are copied to the storage and what registry values are written (if the game needs these to function), then replicate that manually on your host PC. If the files are contained within the installer itself and can't be accessed, then I suppose you could copy them over from the guest machine.

It's not a pretty workaround but that's how I do it for such cases.

Reply 2 of 5, by feda

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Try Win 95/98 compatibility mode on the installer executable.
If that fails, see if the game files can just be copied straight from the CD or you could extract the cab files with UniExtract.
If the game complains about registry values, do what eddman suggested.

You should probably remove one of those links since Vogons doesn't allow abandonware.

Reply 3 of 5, by BEEN_Nath_58

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Looks like you are on Windows 10. And the unavailable installation options looks like the game doesn't detect enough space. The Win95/Win98 compatibility modes should handle such cases

previously known as Discrete_BOB_058

Reply 4 of 5, by Gorion

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Thank you all for the helpful suggestions. I am on Windows 10 and unfortunately, Win95/WIn98 compatibility mode doesn't seem to work (it takes me through to the installation process, but it still reads as the hard drive being too little).

I tried UniExtract on the installer and it came up with an error message (see log attachment, sadly doesn't make much sense to me as to what it could mean).

Looks like I may have to go down the path of a virtual machine or emulator to see the files and registry changes are required to get the game running. I have never run a virtual machine and find it quite complex, would you be able to advise me of an emulator that I can use to get the game running?

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Reply 5 of 5, by feda

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UniExtract is applied to cab files, it won't work on setup.exe.

You should check out Virtualbox, it's free and there are many tutorials that will help you set up Win98. It's fairly quick and painless.
You can then copy over your game files from the VM to W10 if you want. You might not even need registry entries, many games don't care.

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