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Pandemonium! (Steam/GOG) on Windows 98

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First post, by alexanrs

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Hello everyone,

I'm trying to run the game Pandemonium on my Win98 machine. I have lost my original media, so I decided to buy it on Steam and copy it over to my retro PC, as I had done with games like Tomb Raider before. Surely, the first thing I did was to replace the nGlide DLLs with ones from the Voodoo SDK (from falconfly.de), and I thought I was good to go. Unfortunately, as soon as I tried running the game, a popup message appeared saying that a "Win32.DLL" (a DLL file that exists in the game folder) expected a newer version of Windows. Do any of you guys have the original game and are able to tell me if the original game had this DLL on the first place (or was something added later for compatibility with newer OSes, though this means they had to actually recompile the game).

Reply 1 of 4, by gerwin

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GoG has some games where they edit the executables like this: they change the the reference to winmm.dll with win32.dll.
Then put a custom win32.dll in the game folder which is a variant of earlier custom winmm.dll. Both are just the same wrapper to intercept calls to CD audio and play OGG vorbis audio instead. I don't know why they sometimes rename it win32.dll.

(edit typos)

Last edited by gerwin on 2015-02-13, 01:11. Edited 1 time in total.

--> ISA Soundcard Overview // Doom MBF 2.04 // SetMul

Reply 2 of 4, by alexanrs

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Hum... So I would need to, besides editing the file back, burn a CD with the songs. Seems reasonable.

EDIT: Haven't tried burning a CD yet, but hex editing the files to change the reference to Win32 to WinMM.DLL allowed it to run (whithout music). So far so good.

Reply 3 of 4, by alexanrs

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Oh god, the software version runs fine, but the 3DFx runs on steroids. Nikki looks like she is on crack while running and jumping. I've tried a bunch of environment variables but I'm unable to slow it down (the regular Voodoo2->Voodoo1 compatibility ones plus another that should have reduced the FPS count).

Btw, is it normal for me to need to adjust the gamma for every single game? The default seems to be messed up, and I have to manually set it to 1 or 0.9 through environment variables.

Reply 4 of 4, by gerwin

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alexanrs wrote:

but hex editing the files to change the reference to Win32 to WinMM.DLL allowed it to run (without music). So far so good.

Great. 😀
I wonder if there is a version of the CD Audio wrapper that works in Windows 98.

--> ISA Soundcard Overview // Doom MBF 2.04 // SetMul

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