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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Looks like the main blocking problem was that the game was stuck in a loop looking for a multimedia system DLL that was missing, because it assumed there would always be a CDROM available. OP lucked out that the code that called winmm.dll had a GitHub link and he could just patch it.

Too bad Microsoft has kind of softened and lost its reputation for Windows's impeccable backward compatibility. This seems like it could have been easily avoided on the OS side.

I'm currently trying to get Distant Worlds: Universe (which is less than half as old as Worms 2, no excuse Microsoft!) working on Windows 11. Same problem: No start, no error message. I'll try some of the tools and techniques highlighted in the video!

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Microsoft used to keep a really good Shim library to hot patch troublesome applications. Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT)/Microsoft Windows Application Compatibility Infrastructure.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/plannin...

This hack could be accomplished with one of those. In fact here is something that might work https://ryanwill.com/create-and-use-shims-with-microsoft-app...

>CorrectFilePaths – These are similar to symbolic links, but are defined per .EXE instead of system wide

I've been working with getting games from 1995+ working on modern systems over the past two years, and honestly the biggest incompatibilities I've seen have been in the registry. Combined with some redirected filesystem calls, I really think you could get 98% of games working in a portable fashion.

The problem I have with some of these GoG releases is they just patch out buttons for things like networking, when features like local IPX multiplayer can still work with shims.

It's always been a slow rot. Even in the XP days you'd run into issues. I remember Alpha Centauri did NOT like my dual core Athlon and it wasn't even a decade old at the time.

If this was a web service, the popular solution would be Docker!

But the joke might make more sense than it appears. Just like a server that was coded to work on a given version of Red Hat or Debian, wouldn't be expected to run without changes on modern versions 10 years later, I guess we shouldn't expect old games to run without a VM that replicates the system they were written to run on.

> Looks like the main blocking problem was that the game was stuck in a loop looking for a multimedia system DLL that was missing, because it assumed there would always be a CDROM available. OP lucked out that the code that called winmm.dll had a GitHub link and he could just patch it.

Not quite, from my understanding.

The DLL was already patched in GOG version (using the one from GitHub) to redirect any resources from CD-ROM to a local one; however the patch isn't working in Win10 due to some relative path issues (which I'm not sure why; the issue is having system32/ prefix at various places, which Win10 does have?). He patched the DLL again by removing these system32/ paths, and it works again.

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