Yes, I know this is a two year old topic. But, I think this is worth digging it up again:

When I started this thread I was trying to get the game to work in a Virtual Machine because for some reason that is beyond me a 16-bit installer was supplied for a 32-bit game. Any way, I found a way to install Nightmare Ned on 64-bit Windows. This page https://reactos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10988 refers to a 32-bit Setup program that can replace the Setup.exe that comes with the game. It can be downloaded from here: http://toastytech.com/files/Is3Engine.zip - just copy it to the folder containing Setup.exe and run that instead. The game installs now. Unfortunately I still can't play it because some files called dino2d.dll and dmix.dll can't be found by the game. Does anyone have any idea what these files are? As far as I can tell it has to do with the ancient version of DirectX required by this game.

There is a Redist folder containing DxInstal.exe among the setup files which appears to exit immediately without doing anything once started.

Peter Swinkels wrote on 2020-08-03, 17:36:

Unfortunately I still can't play it because some files called dinod2.dll and dmix.dll can't be found by the game. Does anyone have any idea what these files are? As far as I can tell it has to do with the ancient version of DirectX required by this game.

The version of DirectX might be ancient, but it has always been sufficiently common that if dinod2.dll had something to do with DirectX, there would at least be something about it somewhere on the Internet.

My guess is that it is some file unique to the game, or at least to Disney Interactive software of that era, and that the installer couldn't extract it for some reason. I would suggest trying to unpack it manually with some sort of Installshield unpacker and see if you can find it. Or just see where it wound up when you installed it in the virtual machine.

Peter Swinkels wrote on 2018-11-07, 21:02:

some ancient version of DirectX (4.?)

All DirectX DLLs have a version number of 4.x. Usually the "x" is the actual DirectX version. There was no DirectX 4.

According to the Internets those two files are associated with Intel RDX

Also
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20 … 122-00/?p=40963

Okay, in a virtual machine running Windows ME the game installs the following files in the Windows system directory:

Some research revealed these files appear to be stored in a file called Setup.ins. The file's header contains the following string :"Stirling Technologies, Inc. (c) 1990-1994".

It appears I have two options, either find a way to get those files from the Virual's Machine's harddisk image or to extract these files manually.

You wrote "dinod2.dll" in your previous post, but the DLL is evidently called "dino2d.dll". That is a rather fine distinction.

Dino is indeed a pre-DirectX technology, probably best known for its use in early versions of Sonic CD – which does indeed make it odd that "DxInstal" is also included for some reason. Unfortunately that is pretty much all I know about it.

Yeah, a typo which I corrected.

Does the game switch to full-screen window? Most games typically do that. If it does, then it is better to play in VM. When it switches to full-screen, you can drag and resize the VM to play it in any resolution. QEMU does that, I just tried StarCraft 1, and QEMU SDL2 display backend simply stretches the output to fit into the size of window with aspect ratio. This is the best way of running legacy Window 2D games (DirectDraw/WinG etc.), they won't mess up the desktop due to display mode switch into 640x480.

It does run in full screen mode. How would that mess up the desktop?

Peter Swinkels wrote on 2020-08-04, 21:19:

How would that mess up the desktop?

If you are running a FHD desktop with instances of browsers, spreadsheets, word processors and source code editors, when an old DirectDraw switches into full-screen (typically 640x480), then all the background apps resize to fit the screen. When you returned to FHD desktop, you would find all the apps crammed into a corner.

Sure, you could develop a "good" habit of not keeping multiple instances of apps, but this is not how many people use computers these days with big screens and multi-cores CPUs.

It sounds like using a virtual machine is more of an inconvenience. Windows ME is giving problems with sound support.

Peter Swinkels wrote on 2020-08-04, 21:50:

It sounds like using a virtual machine is more of an inconvenience. Windows ME is giving problems with sound support.

VM requires time to setup, but once it is done, the disk image is always there and you can archive it or use snapshots on VM invocation to retain a golden OS image. Once you have those ready, things are going to be very convenient.

I use QEMU for Win98SE and WinME with AC97 sound for legacy Windows games. What kind of problem with sound support were you referring to?

In VirtualBox the sounds will sometimes not play or start looping. Some of those old Win 9x games work surprisingly well outside a vm. Try Jazz Jackrabbit 2 for example. I like DOSBox a lot, but it's too bad Windows 95 only partially works and 98 and ME not at all.

Peter Swinkels wrote on 2020-08-05, 09:31:

In VirtualBox the sounds will sometimes not play or start looping. Some of those old Win 9x games work surprisingly well outside a vm. Try Jazz Jackrabbit 2 for example. I like DOSBox a lot, but it's too bad Windows 95 only partially works and 98 and ME not at all.

I know what you mean.
I got original Win95 to run in an image years ago, but later versions caused trouble.
Personally, I had good experience with this method:
Old OSes Win3x/Win95/98- > Emulators (Qemu, Bochs, PCem..)
Newer OSes; Win Me/XP - > VMs (VPC, VBOX, VMware.. )

Edit: Win Me can handle recent CPUs better, I assume.
Loops in system files (network stack, HDD etc) are altered so they can handle Pentium IV and processors with an equally quick loop instruction..

See https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20200606-win … 5-failed-start/

I downloaded and installed QEMU. But it appears to be meant for highly technical users. There are a lot of exes in its program files folder but no useful documentation except for a readme.rst file. The website is hard to make sense of. Where can I find documentation about running Windows ME in a vm using QEMU?

there is some guide here
Post 732232

@robertmo: thank you.