SHP Forums

Yo yo everyone,

I've been toiling away over trying to get ES2 working, ideally on win7x86.
The only method that has lead me to success is making a virtual machine loaded with XP and then right clicking setup.exe on the taskbar and moving the setup into view with the arrow keys. Then i can install and play. Which is cool....

....BUT! There are major drawbacks with this method.....
1) My HDD space is minimal and using 4gb for a VM with XP isnt practical
2) Fullscreen results in a mostly black screen, so one has to play windowed..and 640x480 windowed is pretty small for a modern monitor!

In my travels i have seen on this site there was such as thing as a 32bit installer, which i assume, would allow me to install ES2 with win7.
This installer is now nothing but a myth....
"Earthsiege II 32-bit Installer - See Metaltech: Earthsiege II"
http://www.sierrahelp.com/Patches-Updat ... .html#ESXP - lists the installer but it a grey non-link.


I could get over the VM impracticality if i could get fullscreen working (im gonna try windows 98 soon)
Or/but
I'd prefer to have ES2 on win7 even if it is windowed.
Anyone able to help?

Hi, I did have an installer for ES2, but somewhere along the line it quit working. Whether this was from a driver or Windows update I am not sure. I have not had the time to try to track down the problem, so I removed the download. If you want to mess around with it, you can see what you can do with the Microsoft Compatibility Toolkit. It's a free download.

Yes please, ive used the ms tool kit with this virtual machine XP method, so yeh ill take it.

Solution?

I've literally just registered and logged in to this forum to add my 2 cents - after all, some years down the line SOMEONE will be in the same position I am today, and I'd be happy if it helped.

I'm running on two different computers - Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit, and Windows 7 enterprise 32bit (laptop), and may have found the method to the madness.

In the former case, I couldn't get the program to run at all - 16bit installer didn't work with 64bit system. So, I used the free Windows XP virtual drive, transfered the image and installed PowerISO again, and installed it (smoothly) to the XP virtual drive. Then, I copied and pasted the installed folder to the desktop of my Win7 drive. I was still getting the 'insert CD' error, until I changed the following file:

Data\Drive.cfg ::
- Change line 1 to (x):\, where X is the virtual drive you're running the image from.
- Keep line 2 as C:\SIERRA\ES2 - or change it to where it is now, in my case, C:\Users\(me)\Desktop\SIERRA\ES2\ES.EXE

but the point is, IT WORKED. It hung up a bit on startup, and started out on 320xwhatever, so the window was dinky, but that can be changed in the options to full-screen, runs smooth. Color glitch in the menus, but what can you do, right?

In the latter case (laptop, 32bit windows 7 enterprise), the installation was smooth as can be, 32-bit environments are them good ol' days now. I had the 'error cannot find drive.cfg' problem, found the SHP suggestion to make your own DRIVE.CFG, fiddled with the locations - and hit the magic 'virtual drive/actual location' combination.

Can someone else in the same situation check my work for me? I'm overexcited that I may have found a restorative for an aged classic, but I'm not cocky enough to say that I've found the one true fix.

TL;DR:
Edit DRIVE.CFG to the virtual drive location, and actual exe location. If running in 64bit, install in a native 32bit environment and copy files over.

PROBLEMS:
- Visual glitch in main menu. Looking into 256 color schema to fix it. Doesn't happen in gameplay, so not much of an issue.
- Joystick not working (64-bit tested, 32-bit unconfirmed). Will use Application Compatibility Manager to try and fix this one, will report back after I'm done.

My installer addressed all of that, but there are further issues that I had originally fixed with a compatibility patch that worked pretty well. The problem is that some update broke it. I checked it on my machine to confirm it and found the same thing. I have not had time to go through it to make another compatibility fix, so I removed it from the downloads. Here it is if you want to try it

I figured that if there was an established installer, it'd do everything I'd figured out, but like the op I couldn't find it. Thank you very much for your hard work and for re-posting it, even if it might not work well anymore.

I'm all the way up to the moon, so whatever my fix is, it worked just fine for me. A compatibility patch for joystick and memorylie was needed to get it stable, but was applied on the 64-bit system with no problems.

If I haven't discovered anything new, disregard the over-the-top rambling But at the least, if someone else has the same problems and the installer doesn't work, maybe it'll come in handy... granted, it seems my major revelation is 'install it on a 32-bit system and copy the files over', but if it works, it works.