Hi guys,

bein new here I am likely to say a big HELLO to you all.

After I heard about the mod you are planning I wondered why not starting playing BOTF again (haven´t played for years now).
But unfortunately I´m not able to install the game. My operating system is Winsows XP. Always when I doubleclick the setup sysmbol on the cd there isn´t starting any installation.

Waiting desperately for any help thanks in advance.


Oh, and sorry if I have posted into the wrong subforum.

Hey there, dilk, welcome to the site!

Don't worry about this being in the wrong forum; this is the general chat forum, so you can talk about ANYTHING you want here - as long as it isn't against the forum rules.

Many people have problems getting BOTF to work on XP, but is IS possible. To be honest though, I've never had - or heard of people having - any problems with installing the game.

Are there any scratches or anything on the disk? Fingerprints could also cause problems.

...Don't worry about it though. There's an alternative available for you.

Over on the BOTF section of the parent site of these forums, there is a downloadable copy of BOTF that doesn't require the CD. It is illegal to download it if you haven't already bought the game, but you obviously don't have to worry about that.

To download it, you have to first log into the site; access to the downloads section is restricted to only those who are logged in. There's no such worries with the downloads section of these forums though.

Once you've logged in (And signed up if necessary) click on the downloads button at the top of the screen, then click on the Birth Of The Federation 1.0 Backup link. That will take you to the download of the .iso copy of the game.

I haven't actually downloaded it myself, so i'm not 100% sure how you install it though. You need to mount it as a virtual drive on your computer with a program like Daemon tools. You'll have to ask someone else for help on that though.

Using the .iso copy of the game is supposed to be better than using the disk because it is faster, (No loading times for the CD) so it'll probably improve your playing experience. I don't know what modding it is like either.

Good luck with getting the game to work, anyways.

A CD image is (theoretically) a bit-perfect copy of the disc, in every detail. So installing, running, modding, etc. is identical to how you would with a physical disc, except you need to mount the .iso file with something like Daemon Tools, as MoE mentioned.
The main performance increase is during game installation, as a ATA133/SATA hard disc is quite a bit faster than a CD drive on an ATA33 channel (even 52x drive can't saturate that). In game performance will only improve if it's one of those games that doesn't completely install itself to the HDD, and so there's a lot of disc access for files.

Erm, as for your problem, if you have the same disc as I have, the game should auto-run the installer when you insert the drive (unless auto-run is disabled), have you tried running the setup in a compatibility mode (right click the setup file, compatibility tab, try windows 98). If you have an different version of the game disc, that may help. That said, I've never known compatibility mode to help an installer, and very rarely an installed application.
The only other thing I can really suggest is downloading the CD image...

Actually, what's your processor? and are you running SP2 with full Data Execution Prevention running? (check by system properties, performance, performance options, Data Execution Prevention) If you have an Athlon 64 (or any other K8 processor) or P4/PM/core duo/core 2 duo with DEP turned on for all processes it is possible that the process simply gets ended, although it is meant to tell you when it does that, but it's also worth checking.

Good luck

Hmm...that's a good point, Laitainion, i've had problems with DEP in the past, but that was to do with Dungeon Seige, not BOTF.

I disagree with you that the compatibility settings does nothing though. I've got many games (Most of which were designed for Windows 98) that require me to set the compatibility settings.

I've never had to change the settings for BOTF though. (I usually need the second XP patch)

It is entirely possible that changing the compatibility settings will also help, but i've never known for it to help install a game either...

*Edit - bloody emoticons!

While not informational...

I've never had a problem running BoTF1. At all. The worse I've seen is the combat crash... and it occurs usually only when the computer retreats.

I'm running XP Pro.

As i think has been stated you can use windows compatability which is located in Start/programfiles/accessories/windows compatability. Click on "somit on cd" and then do the steps and then there you go. The compatability version u need is win2000.

Hi Laitainion,

I had been away for a few days now, so I hadn´t the time for trying your suggestion but it worked!!!

Thank you verry much.

No problem, glad it worked.

Great!

Don't forget to check out the BOTF downloads section of Armadafleetcommand.com for mods for your game. Even after 7 years, people are still making them.

lol try out Dafedz's Ultimate Mod WITH fixed phasers

As for problems i've had with XP, crashing during battles and slowdown of turns (but that's known anyway). And i've never had problems mounting iso's in Deamon and burning with Nero 7

Here are some patches that may help our viewers out there in gaming land.