There is a thread on this forum earlier stating it bypasses the vesa.com check but i tried it and it didnt work...then i searched further and found another supposed vesa bypass.....still didnt work.....now im still stuck with my loved game and no way to play it.....please anyone help!

did you try running vesa.com first? heh

Originally posted by dreem Ive been trying to run my Master of Orion 2 now for quite some time since i foolishly upgraded to windows 2000 professional.

It has it's upsides and it's downsides. For all-around compatibility, the best bet is to install Win2K or XP on an system that already has Win98. It can set up a dual-boot for you and you get the best of both worlds.

I do wonder why you're not running the Windows version. It's on the same CD. You just run SETUP.EXE instead of INSTALL.EXE.

Ive tried VDMSound and it didnt work coming up with the message "you need to run vesa.com".

That's the game generating that message, not VDMSound.

Preferably im looking for a non-format solution!

Try the Windows install first...
My GF3 run the DOS version of MOO2 just fine, no VESA error and no special tool was needed. This could just be a limitation of your TNT2 card.

In my experience, running MO2 on a XP system has no problems whatsoever with the DOS version (compatibility wizard set to Win98). However the Win version is crash prone even after the patch, which you should get.

....
compatibility system in Windows is for WINDOWS PROGRAMS ONLY. Setting it to anything for DOS programs is foolish.

Might be it wasn't needed, however it worked for me. And it true that the dos version is more stable. Use that one (I hate win95 designed games >.<).

I have seen the "You must load VESA.COM" many times.
Most time it is caused by modern graphics cards not automatically comming with the DOS VESA drivers. Probably because with this extra overhead it will slow down the precious stats of the graphics card.
You might need to try 2 or 3 different flavours of driver for you Graphics card before you find one that works with Moo2. I heard rumers that Moo2 was not 100% VESA complient.

I would also recommend running "windows update" to ensure the rest of the OS is up to date.

I have never had any problems running MOO2 with XP Pro, perhaps it has better DOS emulation than 2K? Or perhaps it is as mentioned above, that some modern graphics cards don't do VESA well.

It's been a while, so I don't remember if I ever got the sound working, but then I usually run WinAmp in the background 24/7 so I normally have at least music, if not all sound, turned off for most games. Most older game sound is just fluff anyway, not a critical component of the game as in some modern games where if you don't have sound, you don't get the audio cues for many thing.

Ok I had the MOO2 dos version wich tends to freeze under Win2k3. And I downloaded the pacth 1.3 and unpacked it to recieve a free windows version exe. It worx if I put a dplay.dll and a smackw32.dll into the dir. The problem is that I tried around 3 smack dlls and none of them worx. It throws me out at the first sign of a movie. (antarans, win, amoeba etc...)
In dosbox the mouse is SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW. I mean slower then a slug stuck in superglue. Any ideas?

yeah use the cvs of dosbox. I fixed that mouse problem there.
You are own your own then. as the discussing the cvs here is unwanted.