Thursday, April 26, 2012

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.

20 comments:

Anonymous said...

I miss that Turok. I'm running into problems getting 'South Park' (same engine) to run. It runs fine on XP but will not do anything in Windows 7 64-bit. Guess I'll just partition WinXP and play one game on it there.

JiliK said...

I hate it when that happens. I've run into a similar situation with a copy of Battle for Naboo recently. No matter what I do I can't get it to launch on Windows 7.

Diego said...

Hey friend, thanks for your post! I was able to complete the game, thanks to your tips about the patch.

Thanks a lot!

JiliK said...

No problem, Diego. Glad I could help!

Unknown said...

Thanks dude i realy appreciate your help

JiliK said...

No problem. :)

Anonymous said...

Dude if you where here in sweden i could kiss you on the mouth.
I have tried to find a solution to this problem for some time now. I thought i could solve it by creating a virtual machine with winxp as os but for some reason i wasnt able to do even that ^_^.
i tried windows xp mode(witch is kind of a virtual machine) but that basterd didn´t wana share drivers and then it couldnt find the cd and then i just cracht at boot.

thanx once again for letting me finnish this game ones and 4 all.

Travis FInberg (A.K.A Steam: Tur0k) said...

Hey man thanks for the advice on how to get this to work. I honestly Love turok and still have the n64 versions all of them as well as the Turok 2 action figure still in a box and the strategy guide to turok 2 because it was what got me into fps besides Goldeneye. I have not bought the pc version yet but plan to since it be a nice addition to my collection as well as its a pc game and I love acclaim. So hopefully this works for me. Hopefully multiplayer still works :P. Maybe I can add it to my steam account :D

JiliK said...

Glad I could help, Travis. I'd love to see the Turok games on Steam too. I wonder who has the rights to them now though.

Travis FInberg (A.K.A Steam: Tur0k) said...

I do believe Disney own the rights to Turok now, a shame really. I just ran your file and it didn't work D: the music is one of the best parts D:

Travis Finberg (A.K.A Steam: Tur0k) said...

okay I seem to got it to work but the multiplayer still does that 3dgfx thing or something like that but still works fine? is that okay? that and I said I seemed to got it to work but everytime the song restarts for the level the game stops for a second and starts right back up again. Like a sudden very short noticeable 'pause'. This also happens for modern games to except with doors :P

JiliK said...

Hey Travis. I'm not sure I really know enough about Turok 2 to be much more help. The only other thing I can suggest is maybe installing a 3dfx wrapper like nGlide. That should sort out any incompatibilities between the graphics card you're using and the old Voodoo cards the game was designed for. I think there's a decent chance that might at least stop the game from freezing.

Anonymous said...

When I use the patch, the game tells me the game is infected with a virus. Obviously the patch didn't do that but I can't seem to find a way around it. Did this happen to you? It doesn't apply for the musical side of the patch but doing the core fix completely ruins it.

JiliK said...

No, I've never gotten any messages about a virus.

Are you sure it's not your anti-virus software that's bringing up the message? They usually treat unofficial patches pretty suspiciously.

Anonymous said...

please i would apreciate some help:).
i cant seem to run turok 2 on my windows 7, when i click the icon to run the game nothing happens only the disk spins then it stops again.
it als has a compatible problem wich i can't seem to fix, please help.

JiliK said...

Hm, I used to get a similar problem whenever I tried running the demo version in Windows XP. I never figured out how to fix it though. Somehow it just ran perfectly when I upgraded to 7.

Try running it in compatibility mode for Windows 98/Windows Me (right click on the icon, go to properties and click on the compatibility tab). If that doesn't work, it might be worth giving the patch I linked to in the blog post a try.

Also, are sure your disk isn't damaged. Is it making any clicking noises in the drive? Does it make Windows Explorer freeze if you try to open it?

Anonymous said...

i have tried every compatible mode( without the patch)and that doesn't work.

when i download your patch, how do i apply it to turok 2?

and there are no noises coming out of the cd drive, just normal sounds when i start up any game.

it doesn't freeze and isn't damaged.

what should i do? :(

JiliK said...

Hi again,

Well, first I guess I should point out that it's not actually my patch. It looks like it was made by someone called -=CHE@TER=-. I'm not even totally sure where I got it from.

To apply it though, you need to launch T2SOECDM.exe from the zip file. After you click Okay on the information dialog, a file browser will come up. Here you need to find the Turok 2 executable on your hard drive, select it and then click Okay. By default you'll find the executable in C:\Program Files (x86)\Acclaim Entertainment\Turok 2. It'll probably be called either Turok2English.exe or just Turok2.exe. You'll then be asked if you want to apply the patch. Click Yes here and it'll be applied.

Beyond that I'm not sure what else you could try. When a game won't even launch, it's hard to tell what the problem is.

Anonymous said...

hi,

sorry for bothering again.
But when i try to launch T2SOECDM.exe from the zip file, it can't open it.
it says "it cant find the file, and can't execute it"

forward many thnaks:)

JiliK said...

Oh, it's no bother. :)

That's a bit unusual though. Try unzipping it first and then running it. Failing that, you might need to download it again.