Dungeon Keeper 2, thoughts, feelings and HELP!

Tarrker

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Jun 18, 2008
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I apologize in advance for my terrible grammar. Years of manual labor with no time for anything but video games and family have taken their toll on my writing skills.

So with all this talk about a new Dungeon Keeper game being shat out by Electronic Arts and an epic indie sequel on the way in the form of War for the Overworld I (and many others, I'm sure) have taken to trying to play Dungeon Keeper 2 again.

The game, for me, is among my favorite all time games. It's just one of those games I will never stop playing no matter how much time passes by. Those feelings may change a bit depending on how War for the Overworld turns out but I stick to my guns.

Unfortunately I've been unable to play it for some time now and I was hoping, maybe, just maybe, someone on these forums might be able to help out. I keep a server tower in my bedroom with Windows 98 and XP just so I can play this game but I would really like to play it on my main machine. It's a real pain to switch to that clunky, old piece of crap and I'd also like to be able to fraps me up some YouTube footage.

I've managed to get it going on my Windows 7 tower by following this guide: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wSbluoM_Og however it still crashes fairly frequently for pretty much no reason at all at random. Also, I can't save a game, or it crashes. I can play it with Fraps running but the game crashes as soon as I hit record. Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, in the game has a thin box around it. Even things like particles popping out of the dungeon heart and even the monsters themselves. The frame rate drops to about 3-5 fps while I'm in the menu sometimes. The list goes on and on.

If anyone knows anything it would be greatly appreciated. I'm sure I'm not the only person with problems like this and I know I'm certainly not the most knowledgeable.

Every time I reinstall (making sure to delete ALL the files and folders) the new install seems to already have my settings from the previous install. Not sure if that is relevant or not but, there it is.
 

DoPo

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Jan 30, 2012
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Would that be the original version? If so, there should be a patch for it...somewhere. That may or may not work for Vista+. Don't know anything specific.

If you get the GOG version, though - I am pretty sure that should work on all modern OSes. Don't know to what extent but I'd guess it's going to be very good (you may get some visual/audio glitches but they'd be more along the lines of "annoying" rather than "broken").

What I played last was the Silver edition (google it) and that was relatively OK on Windows 7. The screen occasionally flickered but it was mostly random - sometimes it would, sometimes it wouldn't. And it would start and stop randomly, too - at least I didn't see anything I could relate to it. Also, the game sometimes crashed if you played it for too long but I think that may have been something to do with the PC I played it on.

Finally, you could try Wine [http://wiki.winehq.org/WineOnWindows] though I'm not entirely sure how useful it would be. In theory it should let you play DK2 - probably a lot of other old games that don't work on new Windowses, too. But I've never tried it in practice on Windows, though. Also beware that it could be a rather technical thing - at the very least, you need to install Cygwin [http://www.cygwin.com/] to even run Wine. If you're not comfortable with that, then I'd suggest not bothering with this option.
 

Tarrker

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Jun 18, 2008
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DoPo said:
Would that be the original version? If so, there should be a patch for it...somewhere. That may or may not work for Vista+. Don't know anything specific.

If you get the GOG version, though - I am pretty sure that should work on all modern OSes. Don't know to what extent but I'd guess it's going to be very good (you may get some visual/audio glitches but they'd be more along the lines of "annoying" rather than "broken").

What I played last was the Silver edition (google it) and that was relatively OK on Windows 7. The screen occasionally flickered but it was mostly random - sometimes it would, sometimes it wouldn't. And it would start and stop randomly, too - at least I didn't see anything I could relate to it. Also, the game sometimes crashed if you played it for too long but I think that may have been something to do with the PC I played it on.

Finally, you could try Wine [http://wiki.winehq.org/WineOnWindows] though I'm not entirely sure how useful it would be. In theory it should let you play DK2 - probably a lot of other old games that don't work on new Windowses, too. But I've never tried it in practice on Windows, though. Also beware that it could be a rather technical thing - at the very least, you need to install Cygwin [http://www.cygwin.com/] to even run Wine. If you're not comfortable with that, then I'd suggest not bothering with this option.
Thanks for the heads up. I'll check into that. I was actually getting the same problem you described while playing on my server machine. If I play for more than about an hour on the same map it just dumps me to the desktop, even after saving and loading.

It's certainly an odd problem. I play TONS of old games in Windows 7 with none of these issues. Even games much, much older than DK2. You can sort of tell that to game code is kind of wonky. I certainly don't have any of these problems playing Age of Empires or the original Command & Conquer but I digress.

This post was perhaps a bit premature on my part. I'll probably end up buying it again on Good Old Games. I simply despise having to buy a game twice just so I can keep playing it. I blame Steam for leaving me a bit jaded to the digital market. I've yet to have it recognize a single one of my CD keys. I wish that I could say I thought it was completely accidental. :-/
 

Ubiquitous Duck

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Jan 16, 2014
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I'd definitely give gog.com a try.

I'm lazy and wouldn't try the world of fixes that people attempt online and would just go with gog.com.

I don't completely see it as 'buying the game again'. Because you are paying for someone to update it so that it works on newer machines - paying for someone to do what you don't have the ability to do. I tried running Theme Hospital on my latest machine with the original disc and oh man, did that not work at all. So I forked out some money! It's only like 6 bucks on there and, if you play it as much as you say, is that really 'so' bad?
 

loa

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Jan 28, 2012
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Under XP, right click the shortcut and set it to run in windows 2000 compatibility mode so it'll not crash every 10 minutes.
The gog version is pretty wonky too, it crashes under XP and requires the above mentioned fix but I have no idea if it comes with any improvements for windows 7.

DK2 was a buggy mess.