Hi, welcome to the community.

I'm going to give you my advice. Yes Resident Evil and other games of that engine from that Capcom era can be difficult even on systems of the time. That said, I would never run windows 95 over Windows 98SE. In my experience you will encounter more random issues on Windows 95 of any flavor particularly around 3d accelerated games. Others mileage may vary.

If you are worried about Win98SE performance I run it on my Pentium 133 NON-MMX, and its just fine.

Anyways just wanted to kick off your thread, welcome to the community.

banana cod wrote on 2022-09-16, 09:53:

Hi, I'm new to this community, so if I did anything wrong please let me know, thanks! […]
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Hi, I'm new to this community, so if I did anything wrong please let me know, thanks!

Long story short, I'm having a strange issue when trying to run resident evil on my Windows95 desktop. If I set display to 640x480 16 bit, then run the game, the computer will black screen and freeze.

Any other resolution will black screen then shortly back to desktop.

I have tried all kinds of ways to run the game, I even made a CD and installed the game old fashion way and run the game with the CD, still no luck.

The desktop is NEC OEM desktop, Pentium 166, 128Mb memory, ATI RAGE PRO 4MB graphics card and a 4G TF card as hard drive. System is windows95 OEM, earlier version tho, it can only use FAT16.

All other games running fine, with or without direct3D, older or newer, I already tested dozens of games, only the resident evil doesn't want to work at all.

I read that the resident evil is known for being full of issues but never thought it will act up on a machine from its time.

Thanks!

ATi had some flakey drivers back then... other than try another set (if you can find them), I'd recommend making sure that you've got Direct X 6/7 with DirectX Media Runtime installed. I have both RE and RE2 for Windows and I seem to recall they both require the Intel Indeo 5 video decoder to be installed alongside DirectX Media in order for the games to run due to the in-game cinematics. For what it's worth, all my systems run Windows 95, so that probably isn't the problem.

There is also a bug in the original Resident Evil that causes the game to exit to the desktop right after the first zombie reveal, if I recall. There was some kind of patch/work-around for that. I'll post back after I go over my archives to see what I find...

Shagittarius wrote on 2022-09-16, 14:57:

Hi, welcome to the community. […]
Show full quote

Hi, welcome to the community.

I'm going to give you my advice. Yes Resident Evil and other games of that engine from that Capcom era can be difficult even on systems of the time. That said, I would never run windows 95 over Windows 98SE. In my experience you will encounter more random issues on Windows 95 of any flavor particularly around 3d accelerated games. Others mileage may vary.

If you are worried about Win98SE performance I run it on my Pentium 133 NON-MMX, and its just fine.

Anyways just wanted to kick off your thread, welcome to the community.

Thanks for the advice. I do have another 98SE laptop but that one doesn't have directX support video card. I will try to fresh install a 98SE on another CF card for this PC. The main reason I kept this one on WIN95 is because it has all the original NEC add-on softwares and drivers so I kinda want to keep it this way.

leonardo wrote on 2022-09-16, 21:24:

banana cod wrote on 2022-09-16, 09:53:

Hi, I'm new to this community, so if I did anything wrong please let me know, thanks! […]
Show full quote

Hi, I'm new to this community, so if I did anything wrong please let me know, thanks!

Long story short, I'm having a strange issue when trying to run resident evil on my Windows95 desktop. If I set display to 640x480 16 bit, then run the game, the computer will black screen and freeze.

Any other resolution will black screen then shortly back to desktop.

I have tried all kinds of ways to run the game, I even made a CD and installed the game old fashion way and run the game with the CD, still no luck.

The desktop is NEC OEM desktop, Pentium 166, 128Mb memory, ATI RAGE PRO 4MB graphics card and a 4G TF card as hard drive. System is windows95 OEM, earlier version tho, it can only use FAT16.

All other games running fine, with or without direct3D, older or newer, I already tested dozens of games, only the resident evil doesn't want to work at all.

I read that the resident evil is known for being full of issues but never thought it will act up on a machine from its time.

Thanks!

ATi had some flakey drivers back then... other than try another set (if you can find them), I'd recommend making sure that you've got Direct X 6/7 with DirectX Media Runtime installed. I have both RE and RE2 for Windows and I seem to recall they both require the Intel Indeo 5 video decoder to be installed alongside DirectX Media in order for the games to run due to the in-game cinematics. For what it's worth, all my systems run Windows 95, so that probably isn't the problem.

There is also a bug in the original Resident Evil that causes the game to exit to the desktop right after the first zombie reveal, if I recall. There was some kind of patch/work-around for that. I'll post back after I go over my archives to see what I find...

Thanks for the reply. I tried to install indeo5 but it says I already have a newer version. I got DirectX 8 installed at this point and still no luck. I think the system tries to run the program but for some reason hangs. I can hear the CRT monitor switching and clicking , guess its the graphics card then.

I see it time and again… one game which doesn’t run while everything else works fine, heh. It doesn’t matter what game or what system.

Rerun setup and try a “Rendition” chipset. Although all options use DirectX, this one seems to be the most compatible with cards which aren’t the exact model from the available choices. I’ve read the “Mystique” option also works with ATI cards, but I’ve never tried this one.

banana cod wrote on 2022-09-18, 08:01:

leonardo wrote on 2022-09-16, 21:24:

banana cod wrote on 2022-09-16, 09:53:

Hi, I'm new to this community, so if I did anything wrong please let me know, thanks! […]
Show full quote

Hi, I'm new to this community, so if I did anything wrong please let me know, thanks!

Long story short, I'm having a strange issue when trying to run resident evil on my Windows95 desktop. If I set display to 640x480 16 bit, then run the game, the computer will black screen and freeze.

Any other resolution will black screen then shortly back to desktop.

I have tried all kinds of ways to run the game, I even made a CD and installed the game old fashion way and run the game with the CD, still no luck.

The desktop is NEC OEM desktop, Pentium 166, 128Mb memory, ATI RAGE PRO 4MB graphics card and a 4G TF card as hard drive. System is windows95 OEM, earlier version tho, it can only use FAT16.

All other games running fine, with or without direct3D, older or newer, I already tested dozens of games, only the resident evil doesn't want to work at all.

I read that the resident evil is known for being full of issues but never thought it will act up on a machine from its time.

Thanks!

ATi had some flakey drivers back then... other than try another set (if you can find them), I'd recommend making sure that you've got Direct X 6/7 with DirectX Media Runtime installed. I have both RE and RE2 for Windows and I seem to recall they both require the Intel Indeo 5 video decoder to be installed alongside DirectX Media in order for the games to run due to the in-game cinematics. For what it's worth, all my systems run Windows 95, so that probably isn't the problem.

There is also a bug in the original Resident Evil that causes the game to exit to the desktop right after the first zombie reveal, if I recall. There was some kind of patch/work-around for that. I'll post back after I go over my archives to see what I find...

Thanks for the reply. I tried to install indeo5 but it says I already have a newer version. I got DirectX 8 installed at this point and still no luck. I think the system tries to run the program but for some reason hangs. I can hear the CRT monitor switching and clicking , guess its the graphics card then.

You may want to try DirectX 7.0 instead, in case your old ATi card freaks out about 8.0.

Also, someone shared the 1.00c patch to the game earlier, you may want to have a look at that and the different startup switches in the readme file to see if any of those make a difference.

leonardo wrote on 2022-09-22, 17:19:

banana cod wrote on 2022-09-18, 08:01:

leonardo wrote on 2022-09-16, 21:24:

ATi had some flakey drivers back then... other than try another set (if you can find them), I'd recommend making sure that you've got Direct X 6/7 with DirectX Media Runtime installed. I have both RE and RE2 for Windows and I seem to recall they both require the Intel Indeo 5 video decoder to be installed alongside DirectX Media in order for the games to run due to the in-game cinematics. For what it's worth, all my systems run Windows 95, so that probably isn't the problem.

There is also a bug in the original Resident Evil that causes the game to exit to the desktop right after the first zombie reveal, if I recall. There was some kind of patch/work-around for that. I'll post back after I go over my archives to see what I find...

Thanks for the reply. I tried to install indeo5 but it says I already have a newer version. I got DirectX 8 installed at this point and still no luck. I think the system tries to run the program but for some reason hangs. I can hear the CRT monitor switching and clicking , guess its the graphics card then.

You may want to try DirectX 7.0 instead, in case your old ATi card freaks out about 8.0.

Also, someone shared the 1.00c patch to the game earlier, you may want to have a look at that and the different startup switches in the readme file to see if any of those make a difference.

Sorry for the late reply, I tried, all the way from DX5 to DX8 nothing works, but thanks for the advice.

Meatball wrote on 2022-09-18, 12:40:

I see it time and again… one game which doesn’t run while everything else works fine, heh. It doesn’t matter what game or what system.

Rerun setup and try a “Rendition” chipset. Although all options use DirectX, this one seems to be the most compatible with cards which aren’t the exact model from the available choices. I’ve read the “Mystique” option also works with ATI cards, but I’ve never tried this one.

Hi, thanks for the advice. I tried, doesn't work, I'm now betting on fresh install 98SE

All right, I give up. tried everything, not even fresh win98se will let this game work on my machine. Thank you all for your advices and time.

banana cod wrote on 2022-10-05, 03:36:

All right, I give up. tried everything, not even fresh win98se will let this game work on my machine. Thank you all for your advices and time.

You could also try the Japanese version (besides PowerVR). Look around archive.org for the Biohazard Mediakite version. It's a newer release, which is not so finicky.

Meatball wrote on 2022-10-05, 04:31:

banana cod wrote on 2022-10-05, 03:36:

All right, I give up. tried everything, not even fresh win98se will let this game work on my machine. Thank you all for your advices and time.

You could also try the Japanese version (besides PowerVR). Look around archive.org for the Biohazard Mediakite version. It's a newer release, which is not so finicky.

Thanks, I will give it a shot sometime.

Do you have another video board to try?