Wizards and Warriors under XP

                 An article by Dave Barker

Those who are running XP need to add Activision's Wizards and
Warriors to their list of buggy titles. However, the problems are
not immediately obvious as the game appears to load with no
trouble and it initially looks, sounds and plays OK.

The game is in the true Wizardry mould and you can spend hours re-
rolling characters to get the best "stats", to build up gold
reserves and assuming everything is fine. It is when you have
formed your Party and leave the Inn that the fun begins. The
settlement layouts scroll horizontally and have gates at each
end with buildings in between.  When you place your cursor over
one of the exit gates or a main building it is highlighted and you
then Click on it to enter/exit. In the start location, Valeria,
you can't enter the Magic Shop or the Town Hall but there again
how are you to know which buildings you can enter and which you
can't!  However, in Valeria you can only exit via the
west/left-hand gate but you can enter from either. Odd but not a
fatal flaw!

It was only when I had played the game for about twelve hours
(including a re-start) and reached the second settlement, Ishad
N'ha, and entered I discovered that I could not exit and something
was obviously wrong. After a sometime surfing I discovered a
really great computer role-playing site called The Ironworks,
http://www.tgeweb.com/ironworks/ that has sections devoted to many
games which almost always have forums attached to them. Within
minutes of posting my plea for help someone replied and suggested
it was a XP problem and explained how to solve it.

So if you are, or intend to play Wizards and Warriors under XP you
really do need to visit http://www.volberding.com/WHints/WW-
WinXP.htm to check out the issues and solutions. In the case of
the three towns there is a mask file for town, which unpacks when
you need it. For reasons, which I don't understand, these town
files do not unpack properly under XP. The solution is to download
a utility called Virtualdub and unpack the town files yourself and
save the unpacked files over the original packed files. The whole
process of installing Virtualdub and unpacking the three town
files took less than five minutes and solved the problem.
















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