What is the issue? Audio or copy protection or both?
The last time I used vice city retail I used the noCD by gimpsRus
Have you tried reVC?

DosFreak wrote on 2023-02-21, 11:01:

What is the issue? Audio or copy protection or both?
The last time I used vice city retail I used the noCD by gimpsRus
Have you tried reVC?

I will try reVC. I would like to increase/decrease individual game volume so that the music is audible, but it crashes right when I enter audio settings.

I tried reVC and it works very well, I thought it was taken down by R*.

I downloaded another of the thousands of Vice City games available online and for some reason it worked. The downloaded game has .m3d files named mssa3d2.m3d (A3D related? the game doesn't support A3D?), msseax.m3d, mssds3dh.m3d and many more. Copying them to my game folder made it run. The files were also dated 27-11-2002 so I wonder why InstallShield didn't install them.

But I was not satisfied, since the game runs on Win10 without them. I deleted the configuration file from Documents and now the game runs. Maybe the Steam version installed a different configuration file there, I don't know, neither do I know what the .m3d files do. At least all is well now. All cracks, FLT and others I tried work. Thanks.

Nah, GitHub allowed it back some time ago and there are several copies as well. Last I heard there was a court case about it not sure what the final result was but yet another reason to never buy or play another Rockstar game especially with how they handle the mod community.
Another nice thing about reVC is that it can also run on XP, just need to edit OS ver to 5.1 via CFF Explorer or PatchPE.
Haven't looked at the revc code to see if it can be made to run on earlier os.

The files in the mss folder normally install......Try checking to see if defender flagged them or mabye the CD was scratched or some kind of file corruption. 11/27/2002 is the date for mine as well.
The way the radgametools libraries work is each developer compiles their own files from the code. The .asi and .m3d files come with.

I need to check into the capabilities of this edit you mention, DosFreak. It would be useful for my OP XP build.

I wonder if it would allow me to use the GOG version of Doom 3 BFG on XP.

For Doom 3 BFG Steam version you have to use Steamless . I don't have the game listed as requiring any modifications to the exe for the Steam ver, so it should work. If it doesn't try cff explorer or patchpe. I don't have the GOG ver since I don't rebuy games.
Sadly, no ports exist that I know of for BFG on XP. You can use possibly the same edit with CFF explorer or patchpe on "RBDOOM-3-BFG-1.1.0-preview3-win32-20160411-git-7728dc3", if that doesn't work then perhaps OneCoreAPI would work.

Excellent advice, thank you. I would like to figure this out as a lot of these game patches want something newer than XP. Even the newer Diablo 2 installers won't work. All this is probably enough for a thread of it's own if it's not already.

DosFreak wrote on 2023-02-21, 23:04:

The files in the mss folder normally install.......

Summary:

Actual CD - m3d files in mss folder, old gta-vc settings not working.
Some pre-installed game downloaded - m3d files in mss folder + ROOT folder, old gta-vc settings WORK as well as NEW one.
FLT iso (tested today) - m3d files in mss folder, old gta-vc settings not working.

All executables were tested on each other producing the same result.