Vangers under WinXP: Demo won't work for me

[jaws]

Hey fellow gamers,

after endless investigations on my problem and lots of googling i finally found this forum. In another forum i asked for some freeform games that give the player a lot of freedom in his actions and someone suggested Vangers. So i'll wanted to give it a try, downloaded the demo at gamespot and installed it.

But the game won't run on my machine (AMD Athlon 3000, 1 GB Ram, Radeon 9800 pro, WinXP Home). The game doesn't start, i only got an error message which says:

XHANDLER INFORM
mixerGetLineControls() failed

I tried some compability modes for Win98 but nothing works.

After reading some reviews i am really eager to try out this game.
Does it run under WinXP properly??

[[m]klim]

Absolutely.

[bjoreman]

Yes, the full game with the latest patch runs pretty well in XP. I have a weird colour space problem, forcing me to tab out of the game and re-set colour depth every time I start it, but that's all.

But I have no idea if the demo is somehow different than the full game.

In any case, we can set you up with a copy of the full game. I have a zip file here of the game, plus Zmod, that I'm uploading. I will post a link once the upload finish. But I'm not sure if it's the best way to distribute it. I suppose the nicest thing would be to provide a burnable CD image of the whole game disc that people could get, so everyone can get the great music tracks too. Anyone knows of a "best" way to create such an image?

[bjoreman]

Okay, the zip file is up at

http://www.bjoreman.com/files/vangers.zip

I'm experimenting with good ways of creating an ISO of the whole disc. Stay tuned ...

[[KoR]Voker57]

I've always thought that there's only one way to create an ISO image of the disc xD

[bjoreman]

Well, the first two methods I've tried failed because the disc has two sessions, one for the music and one for data. It seems audio and data are in commonly in slightly different block sizes on CDs, so creating an ISO with one setting for the whole disc makes it unreadable. I could create an ISO of the data part no problem, but that doesn't give us anything extra compared to the zip file.

I'm sure there's a good and easy solution to this, I just haven't found it yet ... I'm off to work now, but tips are welcome.

[[KoR]Voker57]

just clone the disc

[[W]DaRK ALeX]

Voker, what I can say about the ways of creating ISO images, I see you have never worked with DVDs. ISO format is highly software dependent, and this also goes for CDs with complex structure.

And, when you are giving advice in a few words, make sure that it is rather clear to be understood. Otherwise, I'm getting angry when I see such short messages because they look like some kind of neglect and haughtiness.

Now, to Bjoreman. Thanks for the link, it will be useful for some period of time... In future, we'll think about the most optimal way of distributing the game, but we'll discuss it later, not here.

You didn't explain the ways you try making the ISO image so I can't imagine the whole problem at all... We commonly use Alcohol 120% to do this. I can provide you with it, but anyway, I don't think that the disc image would be the best way of distribution, and later I'll explain why in more private conversation.

Finally, to the subject and Jaws as its starter. I heard of something about this a bit earlier, even though I can't remember where. Perhaps, it was one of those vangers who asked me about the full version of the game because they couldn't run the demo. I repeat, this is a big note to Klim and others: Jaws is talking about the DEMO. Full version works right for everyone (at least, it is rather stable and it runs).

I'm thinking of it like an insoluble problem. Don't bother with old executable, get the full version and play it normally.

Use the link provided earlier.

[jaws]

Thanks to all of you for your kind help, advice and input. In the meantime i found out that the demo didn't run because it had some issues with my onboard soundcard and the VIA-chipset of my mainboard. i deactivated the onboard sound and it worked. guess i am supposed to get an extra soundcard.
i also ordered the full game via a german online marketplace. thanks anyway for putting up the download but i prefer the original version.