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DS1 and LoA with Windows 7

Submitted by bare_elf on Thu, 2013-10-03 13:44

[This is a copy & paste from "Death Marine's Journal.: All credit goes to him.]

I found a super easy way to get Dungeon Siege working for Windows 7.
When you try to play the game a window will come up with some bull about having compatibility problems. Here is what i did to get the game working perfectly on my Windows 7 x64 (64 bit):

1. Make sure you install DirectX 9.0c since Windows 7 doesnt come with it!
2. Install the game like normal
3. Go into the directory were you installed it probably C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Games\Dungeon Siege
4. Double click on DSVideoConfig.exe
5. It will probably say Primary Display Driver Hardware change it to whatever video card you have. For example i would change mine to NVIDIA GeForce 8800GTX Hardware DO NOT PICK THE ONE THAT SAYS TnL
6. you can pick whatever resolution, shadows or filtering you want and click OK
7. Now play the game!

EDIT: If you are going to play Legend of Aranna you have to go into your documents folder go into the Dungeon Siege folder open your DungeonSiege.ini file and copy the first 3 (4?) lines. Go back to documents folder and go into the Dungeon Siege LOA folder, open the DungeonSiege.ini file there and paste it over the first 3 (4?) lines there.

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DS1 & LoA General Discussion
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Submitted by RSimpkinuk57 on Tue, 2013-10-08 11:09

That is the advice I followed last month when I had to move DS (with LoA) across to a new system I'd suddenly had to buy; except that, so far as I remember I did not select the option for installing DirectX.

My new system is an OEM build with DirectX 11 already on when I got it (whether it came with Windows 7 or was added after), so I trusted DS would work with that. Is it advisable, or even possible, to have multiple versions of DirectX on the same system? I wouldn't want that unless I were very sure about what I was doing.

I may still have had the bull about compatibility, if so I selected the option to run the program anyway.

One quirk - before saved games from my old system would load, I had to delete my new prefs.gas file and restore my old one.
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Submitted by Lady Femme on Tue, 2013-10-08 13:32

i dont think its possible to install individual versions of directx. the updater doesnt allow u to pick a specific update to install. i think what he meant is to install all the latest directx updates (update all the directx components) for your specific os as released by microsoft.
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Submitted by bare_elf on Tue, 2013-10-08 14:02

Lady Femme wrote:
i dont think its possible to install individual versions of directx. the updater doesnt allow u to pick a specific update to install. i think what he meant is to install all the latest directx updates (update all the directx components) for your specific os as released by microsoft.

Just as Lady Femme said you can not install a down rev. version of Direct X. So if you have direct X 11 you can not go backwards to 4.
Elf
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Submitted by Lady Femme on Sat, 2013-10-12 20:35

i've been doing some digging around and checking and it appears that win7 does not come with certain dx9 or dx10 runtime component updates that may be required by some older programs to run.

thus it is neccessary to download all directx updates available if u require legacy/backwards compatibility for directx programs that require specific drectx runtime dlls to run.
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Submitted by RSimpkinuk57 on Tue, 2013-10-15 07:32

The Tool Kit install application fails claiming "Dungeon Siege is not installed" (which is not true). A registry entry is required. I do not know if this always arises on Windows 7, or if it is the fault (in my case) of a third party performance tuner over-zealously cleaning the registry. I found fix instructions in Jural's post 30 Nov 2012 to Steam Community Forums, http://steamcommunity.com/app/39190/discussions/0/882959527674476138/

[start of copy and paste]
Open note pad, for windows 7 paste:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Microsoft Games\DungeonSiege\1.0]
"EXE Path"="C:\\My Steam Install\\steamapps\\common\\dungeon siege 1"

Be sure to change "My Steam Install" to actual install path of your steam.

Save file as "DungeonSiege.reg" or anything .reg, once saved doubble click file and say yes to install.

Install gmax so siege editor does not error, then install siege editor. Siege editor will error once when starting, just ignore.

[end of copy and paste].
I believe the error to ignore is about unknown video card.
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Submitted by Stuff on Wed, 2014-04-09 20:38

Lucky you just got a nag screen about compatibility problems, mine wouldn't even start up at all.

Seems I got this really rare variation of the problem with the CD version of the game. It seems like something to do with the CD recognition software/whatever you call it, because the Steam version runs perfectly fine no problem.

Unfortunately Steam does not have LoA so I ended up having to use a CD crack to run it, which means I can never play online.

Big big bunch of crap. The best fix would be for Steam to add LoA but no they won't.
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Submitted by bare_elf on Thu, 2014-04-10 00:37

Steam writes the registery values in a location that the tool kit, patches and other tools can not find. Therefore they can not be installed. Iryan solved this problem within the DS1 Legendary Mod for Dungeon Siege 2 you may wish to ask him if it is possible to release this fix as a separate fix so that the tool kit can be installed on a system with a steam version of the game. I am not sure if that is possible but asking can not hurt.

Elf
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Submitted by bare_elf on Thu, 2014-04-10 00:44

Stuff wrote:
Lucky you just got a nag screen about compatibility problems, mine wouldn't even start up at all.

Seems I got this really rare variation of the problem with the CD version of the game. It seems like something to do with the CD recognition software/whatever you call it, because the Steam version runs perfectly fine no problem.

Unfortunately Steam does not have LoA so I ended up having to use a CD crack to run it, which means I can never play online.

Big big bunch of crap. The best fix would be for Steam to add LoA but no they won't.


I recently found on Amazon a DVD that contained both DS1 and LoA for less than 15 dollars and it was on my doorstep in two days. Steam is just a bit stupid on how they do things. Like most game companies today, they are not interested in the users just the money.
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Submitted by RSimpkinuk57 on Thu, 2014-04-10 05:02

Stuff wrote:
Lucky you just got a nag screen about compatibility problems, mine wouldn't even start up at all.

Seems I got this really rare variation of the problem with the CD version of the game. It seems like something to do with the CD recognition software/whatever you call it, because the Steam version runs perfectly fine no problem.

Sorry to hear about your problems, Stuff.

To clarify my comment before yours, it was about getting Siege Editor etc. onto my new system after I'd already got DS1 working, as per Death Marine's advice that the Elf quoted at the start. My DS1 is the LoA CD version, not Steam. The Steam user's solution for the Toolkit worked for me too, whatever the causes of our respective problems. The toolkit I'm talking about was my CD backup of a download from somewhere a few years ago, perhaps from Microsoft's DS1 page.
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