Hi everyone,

BOB & Mig Alley both are experiencing the same issues:

Each game now installs fine & I am able to set options and then
proceed to load each game.

I have updated both with the most recent patches.

However:

With BOB, the Load screen comes up & then stays up, partially blocking the screen.

With Mig Alley, the Load screen comes up & then stays up, not allowing me to see my cockpit or enemy plane.

Can anyone assist me with this?

Thanks,
Stefnuts

You are, as I understand it, running on a 1080x1920 display?
Neither of those sims were written to support widescreen displays.
It's been a long time, but I recall that BoB had a thing called
"cardbase.rc", which required you to hack a solution to your
vidcard's idiosyncrasies so you could run successfully. It
was a script file with a semi-selfguiding set of instructions
on how to conjure a solution. It was never terribly satisfactory.

I've never met Mig Alley, but perhaps it had something similar.

Hi PV1,

How would a person change the .rc file without spending big $$ for software?

Also
Here's what Mig Alley's: Mig Alley Last Error Repeat file shows....This could be helpful to and me:

T:\mig\SRC\hardware\..\HARDWARE\Ddrwinit.cpp line 686 :
Failed to find Direct Draw modes!
T:\mig\SRC\MFC\..\MFC\Stub3d.cpp line 1055 :
Couldn't access keyboard with directinput?
T:\mig\SRC\files\..\FILES\Fileman.cpp line 1016 :
File does not exist for reading(c800=C:\rowan\mig\smacker\DIR.DIR).


It seems fairly telling.

Thanks for your help........Looks like these games are "dead in the water" until who knows what.
Stefnuts

UPDATE:

Take a look at this thread:
http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=36647

It's from Vogons & it appears to be a Visual C++ runtime error and
and another poster said the video card drivers he was using (one verified, one beta) didn't work!

Finally, A program called Dependency Walker, which is free to use, can find out errors with a game.
Here it is: http://www.dependencywalker.com/

Maybe some progress?
Stefnuts

By following the instructions, assuming you have any
idea what changes are required for your card. You can
always do trial and error, which is presumably what the
first users did to figure out solutions for the cards
current at the time of the release. There may be posts
in the archive here about it, in the BoB forum for 2000.

Is the .rc file still applicable with v0.99? I'm guessing
it is. BoB1 was either a DX7 or DX8 game, I forget. (Oh, that
reminds me, you may get more views/responses from people
who've tried getting BoB1 to run if you specify it as BoB1 in
your thread subject (which I believe caqn be retroactively
edited).) Anyway, I have this vague memory that the required
entries in the .rc file diminished with later cards. It may
be that a DX9 compliant card might not need any. I don't know,
as I moved over to BoB2 simultaneously with getting a new
machine, at the time of its release, and never went back.


Your other thread says you're running an nVidia card, but
you're getting the same sort of error messages as he got
with a newer driver for his ATI card. I have no idea what
to conclude from that. However, he did seem to get his working
by rolling back the drivers.

I have no solution or suggestions I'm afraid. Merely posting to confirm that BoB1 was DX7, and it wasn't possible to run BoB 1 and BoB 2 on the same system due to both games using the same registry entries if I understood that particular item right.

Mig Alley on newer OS's and hardware did indeed get stuck on the loading screen. If the screen doesn't disappear after say 10 minutes, it is probably unlikely that you'll get it to run at all. Apart from MA not liking my switch to a wide screen monitor ages ago, I also seem to remember a problem regarding RAM (video?) not being reported right to the sim.

Well, maybe one or two suggestions after all: Maybe it would be possible to run VirtualBox or something like it, and within that, a version of WinXP in order to try to get as close as possible to a legacy OS and see if the games are more inclined to run in that environment, or ask someone you know, if you can take their old XP hardware off of them and build your own legacy system.

Hi PV1,

Regarding the .rc file then, Which free program would work for that to be opened? Off the cuff.


So basically because both BOB 1 and BOB 2 are on my machine....The conflict is happening due to using
the same registry keys?

O.K. Time to uninstall BOB 1 then!

BOB 2 seems to be working outside the 2 minute parameter now by the way.
I can see why BOB 1 isn't.

Thanks,
Stefnuts

Just use notepad. It's a text file. It is discussed
in the readme in the root folder. Always a good idea
to look at those, that's why they're called that.



You could also presumably look at the registry and see what
the entries are doing, and cobble up something to allow you
to switch between them. Worst case would be to just edit
the entry by hand to switch contents.

If you can run BoB2 happily without incident on
W8.1, you may be a member of a very small constituency.


The wonderful world of windows.

Thank you folks!

For me right now, Mig Alley is dead.

BOB 2 is running o.k. however!