Getting Armada (I and II)...

[Kaziarl]

To play on Windows 7 (64-bit)

I found one of my old disks and decided I wanted to play. The disk reads ok, and the autorun screen loads. But when you click install nothing actually happens. Anyone have any ideas on how to get it to work?

 

[Haggis and tatties]

I gave up trying to get them to run on W7.

 

[Kaziarl]

What really bites is that, from what I've been able to find so far, the official party line states it's compatible with the Windows 7 32 bit operating system, but not the 64 bit. That gave me a heartsad when I read it.

I have found ways of getting older games to work, such as the Descent games. But no such luck with this one. Thats why I asked, I'm hoping someone knows a trick or two that I haven't thought of.

 

[daedalus5]

Suggest you check the Win 7 thread - I recall someone getting it to work in the past....

 

[Cary L. Brown]

I've just gotten Armada to run in XP, and the fix for XP ought to work just fine for Win7, or Vista.

The issue is related to the fact that Armada is designed for DirectX 7. And between DX7 and DX8 (much less any of the other versions which have followed) there were significant architectural changes.

In this case, you should "google" for "Armada 1.3 patch." This is a fan-made patch, but it seems to work marvelously.

Here's where I found it:
http://www.fleetops.net/component/option,com_smf/Itemid,3/topic,10788.0/

Also, you'll discover that (once the game is running) you're likely to have some audio issue. This is due to DX7 not using the same amount of "DirectSound Acceleration" which later versions do. If you turn it down to "basic acceleration only," that sound corruption will go away. (The easiest way to do that in XP is just using DXDiag.)

As a side note, I THINK that Win7 eliminated DirectSound's functions in large part, so this may not be an issue with Win7, or perhaps even Vista. But in XP, the sound is all wrong unless you do that.

I'd love to have a way of setting this automatically, and having it stop after running... say, a "fix" in the microsoft application compatibility toolkit, for example. But as far as I can tell, there is no way to implement that at this point, though there OUGHT to be.

 

[Hanover Fiste]

Compatibility mode for XP.

 

[Lor'Vela]

I've just gotten Armada to run in XP, and the fix for XP ought to work just fine for Win7, or Vista.

The issue is related to the fact that Armada is designed for DirectX 7. And between DX7 and DX8 (much less any of the other versions which have followed) there were significant architectural changes.

In this case, you should "google" for "Armada 1.3 patch." This is a fan-made patch, but it seems to work marvelously.

Here's where I found it:
http://www.fleetops.net/component/option,com_smf/Itemid,3/topic,10788.0/

Also, you'll discover that (once the game is running) you're likely to have some audio issue. This is due to DX7 not using the same amount of "DirectSound Acceleration" which later versions do. If you turn it down to "basic acceleration only," that sound corruption will go away. (The easiest way to do that in XP is just using DXDiag.)

As a side note, I THINK that Win7 eliminated DirectSound's functions in large part, so this may not be an issue with Win7, or perhaps even Vista. But in XP, the sound is all wrong unless you do that.

I'd love to have a way of setting this automatically, and having it stop after running... say, a "fix" in the microsoft application compatibility toolkit, for example. But as far as I can tell, there is no way to implement that at this point, though there OUGHT to be.

Awesome find. Good to see the fanbase still keeping these older games alive.