Contraptions is a Windows 9x era remake of the Incredible Machine and I have just recently pulled a 2000s re-release of the subj from a box of CDs in my storage room in hopes that my retro-gaming machine that runs Windows 98 could allow playing it with my kid.

Unfortunately the game would keep complaining about at least 50 megs of free disk space needed to run it. While I obviously had way more than 50 megs available, I tried different approaches for satisfying that requirement: from putting more stuff on the drive to reduce the free disk size to something slightly above 50 megs, to shrinking the partition from 9Gigs to 2 Gigs, but unfortunately nothing helped.

So I ended up firing up a debugger end hex editing in rage a jump that would cause the game show an error and quit. This was enough to get it working.

However, this solution being rather unelegant, I am wondering if I was experiencing a known issue with Sierra/Dynamix games for Windows 9x, and of more systemic fixes existed for the problem.