Asghan The Dragon Slayer Topic is solved

[BR4ZIL]

So, as of late been trying to get this game to work, Asghan is an early 3d game and it runs on either Directx or 3dfx. While i have already finished this game in my younger years, i didint knew english back then so i wanted to revisit this game to actually know its lore and story, as i am a sucker for fantasy medieval worlds

Suffice to say, the game doesnt work natively on my win764 machine, which is funny since Arabian Nights, a game made by the same company and uses the same engine works "out of the box" for me, i suppose Asghan and older version of the engine or something that causes massive problems.

Some stuff i have tried:

-Game doesnt even launch natively.

-Tried nGlide, which supposedly works and makes Asghan 100% playable, problem is, it seems that only works for winxp, on win7 i get a black screens and crash.

-Tried Glidos, doesnt even launch the game

-Couldnt get Directx mode to work at all.

On a WinXp VM:

-Native 3dfx mode, the intro cutscene works! woo! , everything else doesnt tho and the game black screens after it.

-Tried nGlide, same as native, except the image gets frozen on (presumably) its first frame, altho this time i can see that the game is working on the background (sounds, movement etc are playing and i can die). If i change nGlide's emulation options to emulate directx, i can get a black screen with only some textures showing up (such as the menu's description letters), but instead of freezing in the first frame, its all black screen.

-Asghan actually works natively on DirectX mode on the winxp Virtual Machine, but as with many other games (like Delta Force 2), it heavily glitches out everywhere (3d models get super imposed by water and other effects), from what i record of more than 10 years ago, this problem was inherent of the game, so this should be working "as intented", but then again, nobody used this mode back then.

I tried a win98 VM, but i cant get either sound or video drivers to work, so the game (for the first time) gave me some accurate error reports, with both missing audio & video renderers.

If i use software renderer, the game launches in a horribly low resolution (with no sound) and ontop of that it randomly (either when loading or in-game) gives me these weird "red screen errors" saying it couldnt load XXXXX file (the file name varies, but it seems to be related to texture files).

Anyone can help me with getting this old game running?

EDIT:

I also tried the pre-configured VMs posted here on this thread, but sadly it seems they dont support (or i am doing something wrong) 3d accelarated games.

[Scaryfun]

Try this "Unofficial Patch, allows you to run Asghan: The Dragon Slayer game on Windows XP, Vista, 7."
http://www.old-games.ru/game/download/1784.html

[BR4ZIL]

Is there a trick in addition to that patch?

Cause i tried both in my win7 install and the winxp VM install and both give me the same problem, all the .exe just stop working as soon as i try to launch them.

[Scaryfun]

I haven't tried. Since patch is named Windows XP Patch, I'd try running it as Administrator from Windows 7 with compatability mode for Windows XP.

[hfric]

the Winxp patch was because this game was a Win98 native game ... and it fixed the memory leak in winxp and some crash... some of my folk wanted to see this ... so like with Chameleon will investigate it more ... and make it playable

[hfric]

ok Win10 64 bit works fine when you ... dump the whole thing on HDD , add the Winxp patch ... the game will b1tch about not being installed , but it will work ... the trick was the only working emu out there that makes this game work on Win7/8/8.1/10 is Nglide version 0.96 with the compatibility set to Win95 and Admin rights (and this patch of course) ... and the results

English version
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffCOqvAH4ds
German version :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkBev5xx3DA

PS to have music , you have to place the CD in the drive or have the Image ... its CD-audio music

[hfric]

oh and skip movies , the game will crash on those
if you still want to see them ... find the .DAT files those are renamed SMK movie files ... you can open them with a Bink
player or VLC

[BR4ZIL]

ok Win10 64 bit works fine when you ... dump the whole thing on HDD , add the Winxp patch ... the game will b1tch about not being installed , but it will work ... the trick was the only working emu out there that makes this game work on Win7/8/8.1/10 is Nglide version 0.96 with the compatibility set to Win95 and Admin rights (and this patch of course) ... and the results

English version
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffCOqvAH4ds
German version :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkBev5xx3DA

PS to have music , you have to place the CD in the drive or have the Image ... its CD-audio music

Hey mate, recently i tried to get this game working again. Followed your advice (sorry, i didint checked your post until now!)

The best i could get on a win7 64bit machine, following your advice is to a screen with "insert your CD please". if i press anything the game just goes back to the desktop.

Do i need to actually burn a CD to get it working? cause it seems just mounting it doesnt do the trick.

[BR4ZIL]

Hey there, while i am necroing this post, i would just like to say that me and a buddy tested out Asghan in around 7 diferent PCs with diferent OSeses

It seems the "failed to read" errors that people have, even after doing the troubleshoot to get the game running are caused by Intel CPUs, i am not entirely sure why, but a buddy of mine tested the game on both a old Phenom AMD and the latest Ryzen and both run this game flawlessly (even in 4k!). While all the intel PCs had the same damn random "failed to read" errors.

If anyone has any idea why that happens, i am all for theories on how this can be fixed!

[BR4ZIL]

Ok... after 3 years since i last made this post, finally made it work.

Forget all patches and supposed fixes, they just wont work. The best way to do this is to grab Molitor's WinXP Virtual Machine, enable Direct3d Acceleration (something that VirtualBox did not had for WinXp when this post was created), install nGlide inside the VM (Deamon Tools is already included).

Remove the GLIDE files inside Asghan's instalation folder (so it will use nGlide's) and voíla!

Thus, with that setup you can run the game in up to 4k, with awesome sound and CD music (dont forget that the CD must be mounted on drive D, otherwise no CD music). GIve as much RAM as possibly for the VM, so you dont have any lag.

[hfric]

Interesting find ... but did you tested this game on a 1 core set up ? since some older games freak out when they see 16 cores 32 treads (task manager>details>Set affinity> tick all CPus off and only leave ONE ) ... i should have mentioned that sooner

Same is when games see loads of Drive letters or too much Media letters ... like Devil Inside , that has to have max 3 drives and in a specific succession to make this game work C: the CD drive D: then HDD E: ... if you have two media drives this game freaks out

[BR4ZIL]

Interesting find ... but did you tested this game on a 1 core set up ? since some older games freak out when they see 16 cores 32 treads (task manager>details>Set affinity> tick all CPus off and only leave ONE ) ... i should have mentioned that sooner

Same is when games see loads of Drive letters or too much Media letters ... like Devil Inside , that has to have max 3 drives and in a specific succession to make this game work C: the CD drive D: then HDD E: ... if you have two media drives this game freaks out

Not only i tried only 1 core, but i also tried disabling Hyperthreading at BIOS level.

I also tried pretty much every combination of compatibility mode and with the diferent "patches" to no avail, the game outright refuses to work properly (except on rare unknown circunstances, where the game will seemly work for an extended period, only work go back to crashing the next time you launch it). The randomness of the problem leads me to belive this is a CPU and/or RAM related problem and the game might be the one at fault here, since this was never a perfectly stable game to begin with (It will crash once or twice for each 2 or 3 hours of play, this happened back then on an original win98 machine and will still happen on a winxp VM, so save frequently folks).

Since we tested in about 9 diferent PCs (most with Win10, couple with Win7, one with Win98, another with WinXp and my laptop with Win8) and NONE of the patches worked, i strongly belive that any and all "Win7 fixes/patches" out in the internet were never properly tested (someone probably just made the game "work" for 5 minutes and call it a fix) and people just keep reposting those as if they actually worked.

Heck, the actual "WinXP patch" is useless and renders the game on the WinXP unplayable by always giving the error "Please Insert CD and press Space" and crashing if said CD is in the drive.

I truly dont understand why there are so many diferent supposed fixes for this game and NOT one of them actually worked for any of the 9 PCs we tested the game.

Either your PC will run the game flawlessly (like the previously mentioned AMD setup) or it will not, if it works you can use nGlide to play in high resolutions, the patches seemly do nothing (or make it worse) on any of the PCs tested.

We also discovered that the game still crashes on some AMD setups, so whatever makes it work is even more specific than just the brand's diferent technologies.

[Catchamouse]

Now Asghan - The Dragon Slayer works on Windows 10 (fix for win 7 and later) - just go on http://www.zeus-software.com/downloads/ ... patibility, find Asghan: The Dragon Slayer, there download attached file, replace _st_3dfx.exe and run game by _st_3dfx.exe. If music does not work, make sure you have cd image mounted on D letter, if not, you can search for drive letter changer program to change it (or change it by default windows tool, which is less convenient). You also probably need nGlide installed.

[BR4ZIL]

Now Asghan - The Dragon Slayer works on Windows 10 (fix for win 7 and later) - just go on http://www.zeus-software.com/downloads/ ... patibility, find Asghan: The Dragon Slayer, there download attached file, replace _st_3dfx.exe and run game by _st_3dfx.exe. If music does not work, make sure you have cd image mounted on D letter, if not, you can search for drive letter changer program to change it (or change it by default windows tool, which is less convenient). You also probably need nGlide installed.

Holy shit... you actually did it (was it you that did the patch?!). I reinstalled the game just to see it working, i can finally put up 4k resolutions and such, even the music worked right off the bat as well (drive letter was G).

I will refer to this patch every time someone mentions this game on a "help find that game you forgot the name of" on reddit!

[Catchamouse]

I didn't do the patch, I only go to that site after some time and realised they added that surprise that works. I have no experience in doing mods or game fixes.