roothorick
Active member
This machine is gonna kill me, I swear.
I can't believe I'm spending another $10 on burned CD-Rs shipped from California. This time, I'm making backups, FIRST THING.
-E- Actually... I'm gonna try to make a franken-disc from what of the disc that is readable and some other older versions I have laying around. Wish me luck!
-E2- Here comes the worklog. Rolling updates as I figure things out.
- NO SIGNAL IN... here we go. POSTs without videocard present, onboard works fine. Okay, videocard! Order new videocard.
- Videocard arrives. Put it in computer. NO SIGNAL IN. This screen haunts my nightmares.
- Try new videocard in a different computer. Get a picture. Try old videocard in said different computer. Get a picture. Sigh.
- Swap in a compatible motherboard I happened to have. Not consistently POSTing, won't let me enter BIOS.
- Hours of troubleshooting later, stumble across a post that says I need to update the BIOS to work with the processor the game was made for.
- Apparently MSI's BIOS updater program does NOT like FreeDOS. More hours of head-banging ensue.
- Swap in a different processor; now I can get into the BIOS. Discover "M-Flash" menu in BIOS. Leave head-shaped imprint in nearest sheetrock.
- Begin BIOS update from USB via M-Flash menu. BIOS slows to a crawl and never starts flashing. Freaking out because I think I bricked my board, but it reboots fine.
- Trial and error tells me the BIOS simply doesn't like this particular USB drive. A different drive and hey! Finally, BIOS version 270 on the board.
- Reassemble computer, return to game, put in restore CD. Fails on disc 2. Closer inspection reveals a DEEP gash on the label side of the disc.
- Tried cloning the disc with ImgBurn anyway. Fails miserably at 25%. Sigh.
I can't believe I'm spending another $10 on burned CD-Rs shipped from California. This time, I'm making backups, FIRST THING.
-E- Actually... I'm gonna try to make a franken-disc from what of the disc that is readable and some other older versions I have laying around. Wish me luck!
-E2- Here comes the worklog. Rolling updates as I figure things out.
- Everything but PART2.IMG is readable on the disc. Promising.
- The only differences between 1.25 Disc 2 and 1.23 Disc 2 is a newer nVIDIA display driver...except I can't confirm that PART2.IMG is the same since I can't read it off the 1.23 disc. It IS different from the 1.03 disc.
- Didn't work. Isolinux bitched, checksum error. I'm trying just doing 1.23 disc 1 with 1.25 disc 2, only time will tell if it's stable or not and what game binary version I actually got.
- Definitely NOT stable. Bluescreened during first boot, STOP 0x8E in nv4_disp.dll. Nice. Reimaging 1.23 disc 1 / 1.25 disc 2 again, and this time, I'm gonna use Parted Magic to swap in the drivers from the 1.23 disc 2.
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