Odd error message with Win 98

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timbo59

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Apr 19, 2016
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I recently picked up an old laptop that has Windows 98 on it, the combination of which I thought would be ideal for a bunch of old adventure games I have from the late 90's and early 2000's. Most of the games installed without a hitch but as luck would have it two of my favorites wouldn't go on. The first (a classic called 'Morpheus') loaded up okay, I got the start screen up, and was all set to give it a whirl when I accidentally pulled out the power cord and instantly switched off the unit - the battery in it is dead, which I was happy to live with. Well when I powered the laptop back up the game wouldn't load, so I tried uninstalling it and putting it back on but now the laptop won't even acknowledge the disk - why I don't know.

The other game (a great little game brought out by the Discovery channel called 'Byzantine') loads up okay, but every time I try to play it I get this odd message - 'No direct drawer hardware' - what on earth that means I have no idea as I've never come across it before in my life.

Anyone have any ideas?
 
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drtweak
what kind of laptop is it?

For the first issue I'm not sure what is going on with that one.

for the second it sounds like the Video card isn't good enough to play that game.
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timbo59

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It's a Compaq Armada Series PP2060.

Not sure if you're suggestion might be correct, simply because the Byzantine game is fairly old compared to some of the other games I managed to load on that had considerably higher demands graphics-wise - and which are working just fine. It was kind of hit or miss actually - some of the games loaded up, some didn't - I'd say about 60% made it on. The most common fault with the ones that didn't work was that they would load in okay but as soon as I tried playing them they'd crash. Like I said though, Byzantine came out 6 - 7 years prior to a number of the other games that are working and are more demanding graphics-wise. Not like it's life or death if I don't get to play it - simply would have been nice to revisit an old favorite. Thanks to the likes of Playstation and Xbox they simply don't make games like that anymore.
 
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drtweak

drtweak

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Sep 17, 2012
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Year odd its has a AGP 2x - ATI RAGE Mobility P - 8 MB SDRAM which isn't bad for that time frame. I know I had a ATI Rage 128 Pro back then and it kicked ass for what I though at it. I played more demanding games on less hardware as well.

Kind of hard to troubleshoot a 20 year old system and games these days.

 
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ragnar-gd

ragnar-gd

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Sep 30, 2014
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The background of that game is very interesting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_(video_game)
I suspect, as drtweak already said, that for that kind of game (that is based on a video-player, basically), that graphic is just not supporting a high-enough level of DX, OR, that you have to install the latest DX9.0c on your laptop first... might be worth a try...
Actually, that game sounds interesting enough to look for another machine capable of playing it...
 
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