Getting Turok 2 to Run on Windows 7

It's fair to say I have some unfinished business with Turok 2. I got the N64 version for Christmas in 1999, but much to my chagrin, the damn thing wouldn't save onto the only memory card I had at the time or any that I got later. Along with its general difficulty and its slightly confusing level design, this meant I was never able to get very far with the game and I eventually ended up selling it off in frustration a couple of years later.

Picking up where I left off in 1999.
Shoot that poison arrow er,..slightly over his baa-ack.

I still kind of wanted to play it though, and the PC version seemed like the perfect way of getting around the game's aversion to third party memory cards. However, any time I tried to run the Turok 2 demo, on Windows 95 or on multiple versions of Windows XP, I could never get past the splash screen - it would always pop up some kind of error and crash. When I decided to give it another shot it on Windows 7 (64-bit) a couple of months ago, that surprisingly wasn't the case. I think I might have gotten an error message, but the game didn't crash this time. Without any compatibility mode set, the game loaded up, and within a minute I was playing through the first level with mouse and keyboard controls, at a nice sharp resolution, and with the ability to finally save whenever and wherever I wanted.

This was as far as I ever got until Windows 7. Goodness knows why.

It took me a while to get a copy of the game for a decent price, but I finally got to take a retail version for a test drive a few weeks ago. Again without fiddling with the compatibility settings, I booted the game up after installing. I got a warning that my graphics card wasn't up to snuff (To run a game from 1998? Sure, Turok 2.) and an error message about glide3x.dll being missing (which pops up every time I start it up), but it ran. And things seemed to be going well as I made my way through the first level.

It was around here I ran into the enemy/texture bug first. Getting pulverised with grenades by an invisible version of this guy was less than ideal.

After saving a few times though, I noticed that when I saved again, all the enemies in the game turned invisible. Now, I know that some enemies have the ability to cloak themselves, but that wasn't what was happening here, the enemy models were just not being drawn at all. I was still getting shot at though, so the enemies themselves were obviously still there. As I kept experimenting, it looked like this bug was randomly occurring after saving, and sometimes making textures in the level and on my weapons disappear too. Reloading the game and my last save sometimes made everything visible again. The best solution though seemed to be pushing through the gunfire to another area, saving, quitting, reloading the game and reloading that save. That seemed to work most of the time, but was hardly a practical way of making it through the game.

Of course, I couldn't get a single texture to vanish when I actually needed it to, so let's just enjoy this tranquil view instead. Ahh.

That wasn't the only problem I was encountering either. The game was also randomly crashing here and there. But more often than not the crashes were happening while I was trying to save or after I had saved. Clearly I need some kind of fix for these problems. I could only hope the internet had one, as I made my to Google to search for any threads about the game on the Vogons message board. I knew I'd read a few there before and they're usually pretty helpful.

Has Windows ever found a solution to even a single crash?

Going through the few topics that popped up, it looked like any solution was going to a pretty long-winded one. I didn't try any of them out right then. But it turned out that I didn't need to. Later, when I was having a look through some old folders on my PC, I found an unofficial patch for Turok 2 that I must have downloaded from the same message board a few years ago. The patch seemed to be designed just to get the game's CD soundtrack playing (which I didn't even know it had earlier), but the Readme mentioned that this version included a uni-processor mode patch, which might fix crashes on systems with multiple processors - certainly a possible cause of my problems. I wasn't too hopeful about the patch, but I decided to give it a try anyway, backing up my Turok 2 directory beforehand.

The Turok franchise in a nutshell.

I ran the patch, pointed it to the game's single player executable (Turok2English.exe in my case) and confirmed that I wanted to apply the uni-processor fix.  After that, I started up the game again, and since then I haven't had a single crash, the textures or enemies aren't disappearing any more and I've been enjoying the kind-of-cool, but also quite repetitive soundtrack for the first time since sometime in early 2000, I guess (not too sure if the N64 version even had music). I'm about halfway through the second level at the moment, saving every couple of minutes, like it's going out of style. :D

The grey fog remains firmly in place, patch or no patch.

While this patch won't work for everyone I imagine, with the recent meltdown of various file sharing services, there mightn't be another copy of it out there any more, so I'll keep one linked to from this post. Good (dinosaur) hunting, everyone.

Download the patch here.

Update 02/06/14: Got an email from -=CHE@TER=-, the creator of the patch a few days ago. He's put out a new version to fix compatibility issues with Windows 8.1 so I've swapped out the version I have up on MediaFire for the new one and updated the link above accordingly.

Update 13/01/15: Updated patch to the latest version, v1.6.

Update 23/06/15: Updated to the latest version, v2.