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Running Shadow Man on Windows XP

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First post, by noabody

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I originally resurrected an old post that is now locked but I had to add something so this is technically a continuation of Re: Running Shadowman on WinXP .

What I found is that only ForceSimpleWindow is needed to keep underlying taskbar icons from showing through. Additionally the game crashes for me about every 20 minutes. The framerate gets slower and slower until eventually all graphics stop and even if I kill the program the video card buffer is usually corrupted to the point that I have to reboot. There is a fix for the game called Shadow Man crash fix and that seems to work. If nothing else it prolongs the crashes but I've been playing for hours now. I have updated my fix to include an updated mini-image that works with this patch and the original game .exe's.

It still contains no files but this time the last 4 sectors of the image are moved to just after the TOC and two of those sectors have errors which is how the game validates an original disc, I guess. Anyway, do a full install of the game, replace shadowman.exe with the one from shadwfix.zip, apply the compatibility fix for playability and optionally mount the mini iso image in daemon tools to play without the CD in the drive.

I spent hours and hours on this so I hope it helps someone.

Edit: That patch prevents the U.S. version from using certain items and it only prolongs the inevitable lockup. At least the symptoms are fairly obvious and if you shut the game down and load it up before the crash, you can keep playing. At least the mini-image may be helpful to somebody. I can see now that it's too difficult to get this working and the N64 version in an emulator would be more reliable.

Edit: Even with an original disc on two different XP machines with various compatibility patches the program says the wrong disc is inserted. Although it would be possible to make a SECUROM mini-image with the Sony subchannel data, I don't think that XP is compatible with version 1 SECUROM anyway. Regardless of your feelings on piracy, a no-cd version of D3DconfigUtility.exe and Shadowman.exe are pretty much required. I can't help you find these so good luck.

I can tell you that even in 2009, Shadow Man is a cool game and it's worth playing. I think the computer version looks the best.

Reply 1 of 4, by Mylen

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Hi nobody!

So you are the one who replied to the other thread before it was closed. It was quite a lengthy post full of information - like the one on this thread - so I think you know something about this issue.

I have a very specific problem about Shadowman(PC) however: texture quality. 🙁

Reading your posts, I first considered myself somewhat lucky - because I could run the game without(!) a patch/fix/whatever. Then when I looked at the game's graphics, I simply didn't want to believe what I'm actually staring at.

NO TEXTURE FILTERING AT ALL!!!!
I asked myself: How could this happen? Because it used to(!) run at normal, HQ textures with at least Bilinear filtering applied on the textures. The textures look awful, blocky as hell! It is even uglier than Redguard's graphics (which I could play with a glide wrapper at good quality).

My first thought was: it's got to be the graphics driver!!!
Yeah, let's try an older version.

Card: NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 440 with AGP8X
Driver: ForceWare Release 90 Version: 93.71 WHQL Release Date: November 2, 2006

I tried it with a Forceware 81.98 (February 7, 2006). It didn't work.

So, after all this lenghty post: what driver do YOU use or recommend using?

Reply 2 of 4, by Patrick benatar

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I have been wanting to play this for years, I love the short lived, hard edged comic series this was based on.
I was able to get it running on a pentium II laptop running win 98se using the original disc, with nice graphics and full sound, but for whatever reason it would crash eventually before getting more than a minute or two into the first stage, and when using the original disc, I was never able to get it to run on XP, no matter what I tried, I am eager to hear solutions for running this game, it seems that it cannot run on vista at all.
I'm not sure what driver is needed in your case, but when I ran it on pentium II, I didn't have an ati or nvidia card or voodoo or any of the cards that it suggested and I knew nothing about updating drivers, but I could still run it, that shows that there are other options to play with at least in trying to make it work, as it ran with the dodgy built in laptop motherboard card that I had.

Also, this may be one of the cases where a game runs better without dual core processing.

Reply 3 of 4, by Harekiet

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The n64 emulated version runs fine, dunno how much that has changed compared to the pc version though but i've never been able to run the pc version anyway.

Reply 4 of 4, by Patrick benatar

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Harekiet wrote:

The n64 emulated version runs fine, dunno how much that has changed compared to the pc version though but i've never been able to run the pc version anyway.

I have been wondering if it is possible to re-engineer games such as this and Manhunt to run on vista or maybe win 7 at all, would it take many weeks and months to accomplish a task like that, or be relatively easy for those with the knowledge, or completely impossible without say virtual PC ETC...

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