Running MOO2 on Windows 2000

[Gunsan]

This article was posted on NTCompatible a while ago. Somehow I couldn't get back to it today, so I can't provide any link:

I found a most mysterious (and thus far, undocumented) way to get Master of Orion II to run *perfectly* under Windows 2000 Professional. Best of all, it's simple.

After reading through dozens of posts on various 'boards online, I saw that over and over again, people were talking about mouse hangups and screen corruption. I was able to replicate all of these problems by turning my video acceleration settings down:

Display Properties/Settings tab/Advanced button/Troubleshooting tab

Obviously, this wasn't a very good solution- in my case, running win2k Pro with Directx9.0b, I was losing control of the mouse (but *not* the keyboard) when I passed beyond the initial game menu screen.

So, convinced that the problem had to be a DirectX issue, I opened DXDIAG.EXE (just open up Start button/Run/ and type "dxdiag").

Then I went to the Display tab and *disabled* all DirectDraw acceleration. Yes, that turns off everything, including Direct3D, so you'll have to set this back to "enable" if you want to play more modern games.

Turning it off worked absolutely perfectly- MOOII runs flawlessly, other than the few well-documented bugs in the the Win95 executable.

I've tested this solution on two machines, with the same results, but I have yet to try it with XP Pro, so testing needs to be performed by somebody in the community. Please pass the word on this solution for game-lovers everywhere... MOOII is a much-loved game, and I'm glad I found a better solution than what I'd documented online

I did like he said and yes, it worked. The mouse did no longer freeze immediately after passing the initial menu, like it had previously on Win 2000. However, as my empire grew larger and more intricate another problem increasingly surfaced: screen colour corruption. The planetary screen tends to turn red and the galaxy screen background and several buttons entirely black, making the game prctically impossible to play.

Interestingly, I've had this exact problem previously on Win XP, but it was then solved by installing the game from the hard drive rather than the disc. For some reason this does not work now.

I'd like to see comments from other people regarding their experience with MOO2 Win 2000 compatability.

[Shadow25]

Only problem I have is mouse freeze only on certain menu : Tax change, colony name, etc. But all the important thing galaxy, research, build queue, colony, ship design and tactical combat are A1. Even when the mouse freeze just right click, help pop up appear move the mouse then left click and left click again on your selection. But I rarely change tax and never change colony name so ....

I got it working with patch 1.31 and using Microsoft compatibility toolkit 3, not the same as apcompat. You can get it on microsoft site http://www.microsoft.com/technet/deskto ... act30.mspx

Create a new database entry for the game with the FIX button and select win98 compatibilty fix, test run and voila. Played nearly 100 hours, no not in one time , still got no problem like I did. Screen corruption, black background, weird color etc.

Hope it help.

[discord]

my suggestion? dont.
have a standalone win98 install, and play from there, it's what i do, and it works fine.