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First post, by Gagster

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I have this very old CD containing the rare Windows 9x versions of both Aladdin, Lion King and the Jungle Book games.

I have struggled for many years getting them running on modern PCs; last time it worked was when I had a Windows 98 PC a long time ago.

I recently got a little bit progress though. Using dgVoodoo2 (2.62.1) and its ddraw wrapper while running Aladdin in Windows 98 compatibility mode with 8-bit colors enable, the game now actually starts on my Windows 10 PC.

I then get welcomed by the game in windowed mode, displaying a single color instead of actual graphics. Pressing Alt+Enter gets the game into fullscreen mode, and the dgVoodoo2 wrapper kick in and renders the graphics perfectly.

Now the game runs as smooth as it should, the sound plays OK, but the actual in-game music is not playing at all.

The game's music is stored in midi format, so all the games music is contained within *.mid files (in the same folder as the game). It seems like the Windows 95/98 compatibility mode in Windows 10 can not run the midi files in my setup, and the midi files is the main reason I think the Windows 95 version of Aladdin is the best port of this game (a conversion of the Sega Genesis port with just as smooth framerate, but with even better sounding music because of the midi soundtrack).

When it comes to both the Lion King and the Jungle Book though, starting the Windows executables (lionw.exe or junglew.exe) with dgVoodoo2 installed and the compatibility settings turned the same as Aladdin, the game window opens but a message telling "Can't open EPFS file" appears. I just did a clean install from the Disney's Classic Video Games CD, and the *.EPF file is in the games folders (I even tried renaming the *.EPS files to *.EPFS, but nothing happened).

It seems like this game compilation is quite rare; PC Gaming Wiki does not mention it at all, and most info about those games on PC and making it work is mostly about its MS-DOS counterparts. Thereby I haven't got much guidance online when it comes to run this game compilation on modern Windows 10 PCs.

I tried running this in some kind of VirtualPC software some years ago (I try every two, three years or so I believe), but even virtualization struggle while trying to play the Windows 9x ports of those games in my experience.

CPU: i7-4790K
RAM: 16 GB
GPU: GeForce GTX 1080
OS: Windows 10 64 bit

Reply 1 of 7, by dr_st

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It appears quite rare indeed; fortunately, someone uploaded the ISO to the Internet Archive. The suggestions I brought up in your other thread probably still apply, but, man, you are looking at what is probably one of the worst-programmed, hackish ports of video games in history. Even on WinME (which should not need dgVoodoo at all), I could not get them to work properly. Lion King plays no music; Aladdin does, but terribly quiet (there may be something wrong with my MIDI output, though); Jungle Book complains about missing Wing32.dll (so there is a chance it would work fine once I got that, but I didn't bother).

I suspect that the file open error may be related to file system issues (like cannot work with NTFS or cannot work with partitions over certain size, etc).

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Reply 2 of 7, by Gagster

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The last time I successfully played those games I'm pretty certain my harddrives were running fat32 instead of NTFS, so that might be a clue.

I was kind of bummed when the newly released Disney Classic games seems to use the Genesis Aladdin soundtrack, without enhancing the music instrument quality (I would love to have a combination of the Genesis versions smooth gameplay combined with the MS-DOS version good-sounding music quality.

CPU: i7-4790K
RAM: 16 GB
GPU: GeForce GTX 1080
OS: Windows 10 64 bit

Reply 4 of 7, by Gagster

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The Snes has a cropped aspect ratio of 8:7 (was usually stretched to fit the old 4:3 TVs when connected to actual hardware), making say the Lion King a more "narrow" experience in terms of field of view (the Genesis version suffered a bit in terms of graphics and audio compared to the Snes version, more comparisons of the differences on the retro-sanctuary web site), and Aladdin for the Genesis had this underwhelming sound-quality in its in-game music compared to let's say the ms-dos version. With Aladdin in its Windows 9x version on this compilation disk, I think it was possible to manipulate the actual in-game music to sound even richer by changing the settings for midi-output in Windows itself, making it possible to make it sound just as good as the ms-dos version.

CPU: i7-4790K
RAM: 16 GB
GPU: GeForce GTX 1080
OS: Windows 10 64 bit

Reply 5 of 7, by mrpenguinb

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I have the MIDI music working in Aladdin somehow. I don't know how....
I have no clue on how to fix the graphics, I even tried using dgVoodoo2.
I also ran the game on Windows 98 SE and it worked flawlessly (despite color limitations and resolution issues).

Make sure that the default/preferred MIDI device is set correctly in Windows, or else the music won't play (otherwise it might select a different audio device).

Last edited by mrpenguinb on 2019-11-13, 07:17. Edited 3 times in total.

Reply 7 of 7, by mrpenguinb

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I managed to get the game to run in a window with graphics and all (even the music too!). Is the music working for anyone else? It has never not worked for me so far.
Using Direct3D 11 MS WARP (software) as the output API in dgVoodoo allows the game to be run in windowed mode.
The trick to making windowed mode work is to press Alt + Enter when the window turns pink (this is at the East Point logo).
The window will be a tall column still, but if you expand the window it will be the max resolution of your monitor, but windowed. You may have to lose window focus by going to another window or by interacting with the Desktop for the window to be expandable.
The game runs quite well, finally being able to see the graphics, except at a much higher resolution and detail. From what I have tested, only dgVoodoo's software mode can make the game go windowed properly.