Most predictable title ever. I must be an NPC.

I am one of those weird people who love PC computing from 1985 to 2001. I have a machine that runs Windows 98 natively along with a blistering 16X speed Yamaha CRW4416E CD-ROM, Sound Blaster sound card, and ATI Radeon 9600 series graphics card. I have been trying to get an authentic installation of Max Payne to run on this machine for a couple of days of on and off tinkering. The core issue seems to be around the terrible disk protection mechanism they used called SafeDisc.

At first I thought it was just the speed of the CD-ROM, which was causing the game to not recognize legitimate media. It was throwing a dialog box up stating “Cannot locate the CD-ROM” with additional text “Please insert the correct CD-ROM, select OK and restart application.” So, I lowered the speed to 4X using a utility called Nero DriveSpeed. That helped get past that particular error.

At this point, the game would start and the initial movie would play. After aborting the movie or letting it complete, the game would crash before reaching the game menu. Sometimes the crash would exit the game, other times it would cause the screen to freeze and require a reboot. I have tried running the game using different versions of DirectX and different screen resolutions and color depths. No dice. I am sitting at the latest version of DirectX (v9.0c) for Windows 98.

The confusing part in all of this is that this is a PC configuration that is suppose to be 100% compatible with the game. It should be noted that I have very little additional software installed on this machine which could cause compatibility issues. After researching the issue, it seems that people have more luck getting the game to run on Windows XP than on Windows 98, but it could also be that most of the people who posted an issue were using that setup; it is impossible to say.

I will dig into this a bit more over time, but it will be a slog.

Categories: Games, Windows
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