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Uncle Albert (Oncle Ernest) modern pc problem

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First post, by Myloch

Posted on 
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Hi men,
I've recently managed to get these rare animals in my collection: the first Uncle Albert trilogy by Emme / Lexis Numérique. It installs correctly but when you run game exe (chapp.exe), it does nothing. The game uses quicktime, macromedia director or something like that. A tool like OTVDM installed on your system is not helpful in this case. Any idea if a patch exists or some new dlls or similar?

Note: I know I can always use a virtual machine, but I want to find a different solution.

"Gamer & collector for passion, I firmly believe in the preservation and the diffusion of old/rare software, against all personal egoisms"

Reply 1 of 2, by BEEN_Nath_58

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I recalled from my test 2 years back that the game would crash in waveOutGetNumDevs. Disabling the sound would let it work. I tested only Magical Album

previously known as Discrete_BOB_058

Reply 2 of 2, by BEEN_Nath_58

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As to what I understood, and following what crazyc said, the game is calling midiOutOpen() from inside DllMain, which is illegal because DllMain runs while Windows holds the loader lock.

midiOutOpen() internally touches COM/audio subsystems, and during cleanup it eventually calls CoUninitialize(). On modern Windows, COM detects that this is happening during DLL load/unload and intentionally crashes the process to avoid deadlocks.

Also it seems like bypassing midiOutOpen is enough. DxWnd has a Tweak/sound:midiOutOpenBypass that may be fit for this case

previously known as Discrete_BOB_058

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