Hi all!

I'm having some problems running DLR under Win7 (not totally unexpected!), and frankly I don't know enough technical stuff to even guess what the exact problem is.

I eventually managed to install the game (I won't say how, as I'm not sure if it's technically legal), and now have all files where they should be. The game starts more-or-less properly - there are some weird colour glitches, but not enough to be a major issue.

The real problem occurs after I start the game and enter either a campaign or single scenario. As soon as I scroll the map or enter certain menus, the game freezes - permanently, requiring me to close it via Task Manager. In effect, this makes the game entirely unplayable.

Does anybody know what causes this, and is there a way to fix or avoid it?

There seems to be some ideas in this thread

Okay, I didn't understand the reference to the 'wincursor switch' (like I said, I'm not very technically-minded!), but I did everything else in that thread and now it works perfectly (almost - one unexplained crash in two hours of play)

Thank you Spiderman (I never thought I'd get to say that!), and also to whoever explained it so well in that other thread (I didn't note your name, sorry!)

I'm not sure what the wincursor exactly does either, but on OSes like Vista or Win2000, you'd create a shortcut pointing to the Warlords executable and put "-wincursor" after it. I think it has to do with mouse cursor stability or something. But anyway, if you didn't do any of that batch file stuff where it's mentioned in that thread, don't worry about it since it seems to be working for you.

Hmmm, I might investigate the wincursor thing then - I've noticed since my last post that the game tends to freeze if I move the cursor too fast.

Do you mean that I literally just add the word -wincursor to the end of the filename of the shortcut's target?

The Other,

Yes. Just be sure to leave a space between the end of the name and the -wincursor part.

KGB

I tried this, but Windows won't let me do it for some reason - I tried every possible permutation of spacing, upper/lowercase, adding or removing speech marks around the file name. In every case, Windows rejects it, saying that the filename or path is not valid.

Weirdly, it works fine if I use task manager's 'New Task' to start the game - in this case, for some reason it allows the -wincursor, even though the name/path/whatever is identical to the one that gets rejected by Shortcut Properties. So it seems that Task Manager is my new best friend...

I hate computers - I thought they were supposed to be flawlessly logical, but obviously Windows doesn't agree!

EDIT: I really hate computers...
For some reason the game now crashes and exits if I try to start a new campaign or scenario. This happens no matter how I start the game, whether by shortcut, New Task or the original .exe file. But I can still play random maps and load saved games, both of which work just fine. I haven't changed or moved any of the game files, or altered any properties of anything. The only change is that I installed Molotov's editor - in a separate folder, and I haven't even run it yet, let alone changed anything.

Any ideas?

The Other,

You must have done something wrong then in the shortcut. Mine looks like this:

E:\DLR\Darklord.exe -wincursor

Sometimes I have seen people do this "E:\DLR\Darklord.exe" -wincursor which is not right. Other times they have accidentally typed Darklords.exe instead of Darklord.exe.

Campaigns/Scenarios: This is normal. Under XP, you must go to the Compatibility tab and enable compatibility for Win 98/Win ME. Otherwise in XP the game hangs forever when trying to access the list of campaigns/scenarios. I assume the same issue exists for Win 7.

KGB

I fiddled and I fiddled some more, and at last got the bloody thing working!

My personal gremlin must have been working overtime, because it turned out that the only successful solution was the exact opposite of what KGB suggested.

The shortcut now reads:-
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Darklords Rising\Darklord.exe" -wincursor
which I'm pretty sure should not work - but it does.

And I found that I need to turn compatibility mode off to access campaigns and scenarios, start and immediately save the game, then exit and re-start with compatibility on to keep the game from crashing every time I look at anything...

All of this runs completely counter to (what I thought was) common sense - but it works, so I don't mind.

Thanks to those who pointed me in the right direction and told me what to fiddle with!

Well, for what it's worth, I've always had the path in quotes in my shortcuts, but that was on 2000/XP. I don't think I've had a chance to try it on a Vista or Win7 machine.

Glad everything's working for you!