Windows OEM Disk Key Trick.

If I had known about this years ago I wouldn't have bought so many copies of Windows XP. Every time I bought a new computer I would buy an OEM copy of XP. Almost all store bought systems like Dell, Toshiba, Lenovo, et al. come with tons of crapware that just slows things down and takes up all your hard drive space. Using an OEM disk I could wipe the hard drive and just have the stuff I really wanted on it. I found out years later that I only ever needed to do was buy one disk. First of all I was fooled by the hype from Micro$oft that said once a key was activate it was permanently attached to that system. Nope. You can transfer it to another. If the auto-activation fails just call MS and tell them that you changed the motherboard or some such. The next thing I would find out is that the sticker with the CD key can be used with a plain vanilla OEM disk from Microsoft.

There are some things you have to know to make this trick work right. You have to match up the version of Windows listed on the sticker with the same OEM disk. So for instance you have to use the CD key for XP Home with an OEM XP Home disk. You can't mix and match Home and Pro. Same thing with Vista, 7, and 8. You also must match bits. 32-bit with 32-bit and 64 with 64. Disks will be labeled, stickers not so. Most XP machines will be 32-bit. Vista machines are pretty much a crap shot. Win 7 boxes will mostly be 64-bit. (I have found some 32s.) Win 8 I have yet to find one that is 32-bit. Now if you can access the hard drive it's easy. If there is a folder named "Program Files (X86)" you have a 64-bit system.

When the prompt to input the key comes up in Windows XP, Vista, and 7 all you have to do is type in the key on the sticker affixed somewhere on the tower or the underside of the laptop. If activation fails call Microsoft. Nowadays they have a computer system for this and ironically enough it is easier than talking to a person.

Now Windows 8 is a different animal. No stickers. Go look. I went to several stores and found not one machine with a sticker on it. I did some digging and discovered that the key is now in the BIOS. Meaning the Micro$oft has finally won the battle. They have been trying for years to force PC vendors to do something like this. Ostensibly to stop pirates. That is a problem. Demo models on stores shelves are easy prey. Copy the key down and you have a free copy of Windows. In reality it is a way to force people to buy a new copy of Windows if the motherboard croaks. Are these companies really going to waste storehouse space keeping thousands of spare motherboards for each variation of computers they make? They'll probably wind up charging you for a new copy of Windows every time you send it in to be fixed.

However, the trick works. I was able to use an OEM Win 8 disk on a store bought system. The key was automatically inputed. (I used a key sniffer app on the original hard drive and on the one I used. Remember those hard drives Staples had on sale?) One caveat though: I didn't try activation. Oddly enough the machine wasn't activated to begin with. I didn't want to activate with a hand drive that I put in, I would rather use the original.

Why even buy an OEM disk? Can't you make one? Yes. You are allowed to and supposed to make a back up copy based upon the stored image on a hidden partition on the hard drive. It saves PC manufacturers all of a dollar to make you burn your own copy. The problem is that it also puts all the crapware on that copy. The OEM disk is just Windows.

Once again: Why buy an OEM disk? You can burn your own copy. Okay, but on occasion I work on other people's computers. Usually they haven't made that copy. I can use my own OEM copies on many different computers. When it comes to drivers all I have to do is download them form the vendor's web site. Also if their system has been infected with malware, there is a probability the the re-install hard drive partition has been infected as well.

Aren't OEM disks expensive? Doesn't that add a lot to the cost of a computer? Yes. Something like OEM disks are for people like me who like to experiment and tinker. Check with your local mom and pop computer store. The one I go to will make you a copy of Windows and sell it to you for about ten dollars. Providing you show them the original sticker.

Finally on an unrelated note: Rosenkreuzstilette Freudenstachel does work on Windows 8. The original version and 103a.

From Fraudenstachel to Freudenstachel: How to use RKSF patches.

Most common time for me to catch a mistake in a comic: one minute before posting it.

Second most common time to catch a mistake: one minute after posting it.

Third most common time: years and years later.

As good as the programmers are with our favorite video game franchise, mistakes will slip by. Some are not obvious to begin with. For instance why the game crashes to desktop randomly. It doesn't happen all the time. Try as you might you can't get it to repeat the crash while the screen capture software is running. Or why does the Rush Coil not appear even though you're using the Iris Stage password?

Fortunately there are patches to fix this. (Insert line from Blazing Saddles here.)

Using the RKSF patches is different from the Rosenkreuzstilette patches. The RKS ones use an EXE file the bring you to a menu that makes you search all over your hard drive to find the game and copies the new files over for you. RKSF makes you do all the copying and pasting.

As always you must make a backup copy of the original. Staples recently had a sale on 500GB hard drives. I bought a bunch. So I gots plenty of space.

I'm using Windows 7 so I don't need to unzip the files. All you have to do is just click on it like a normal folder. Highlight all the files and just right-click and Copy or hit Ctrl+C.

Here you will need to click "Copy and Replace."

Here click "Yes."

Now you have a fully upgraded version of Rosenkreuzstilette Freudenstachel. Of course it resets your controller configuration.

I keep an original copy of the game so I can continue to enjoy stuff like:

And

(Being pointed out by a guy who routinely misspells the name of his own web site.)

That second image leads me into a rant that I'll keep short. Whenever the word Asian is used to describe a person, some people will start the whole L/R stereotype BS. Doesn't matter if the country is Japan, Korea, China, Vietnam, or wherever. It bugs me because I spent two years in Korea and half the country is named "Lee." I have even gone so far as to engage in conversations with Korean-American friends of mine just to see if a joke I wanted to do in the comic would work. Ultimately I just let it go. You're not going to change a stereotype overnight. Things like that image up there don't help.

That Whole Eye Surgery Thing.

I seriously doubt there is anyone who was reading the comic back in 2006 that still is. I know that no one is going into the archive to read the Season 18 run of comics. In them is a series of comics of me poking fun of an eye surgery.

That all started when I was just a little boy. I was born with a defect in my eye that if I didn't get fixed I would have gone blind in that eye. Due to circumstances beyond my family's control, I was never able to get the follow ups I needed. It really wasn't much of an issue. I can't see what I call "artificial 3D." When you put those goggles on what I see is barf inducing semi-interlaced double images. That aside I was still able to get my driver's license and graduated high school (thank goodness for spell checks, guess which one in this sentence I got wrong on the first try.) My eye was not much of an issue. The state has me declared legally blind in that eye, but they have never given me any guff over it.

The Army on the other hand.

Since I couldn't pass the eye test with that eye I couldn't get licensed by my company. So each and every time went to a new unit I had to go to the ophthalmologist and get permission from the doctor to drive a Humvee. Every time I saw the doctor they would say they could fix that problem. I turned them down because I simply didn’t have the time and as a private I had no pull. They also didn’t explain to me what was going on.

Then one did. He told me that while the surgery I had as a kid wasn't new, no one had done any follow up surveys until years after my surgery. It had been found out that the charts used at the time were off by one millimeter. Using the new charts he could fix my eye and if that was successful I could have normal vision like everybody else. I decide to do it because I was now a sergeant and had some pull. Also I had decided not to re-enlist and go home anyway so get it done now. I could get it done before going to Afghanistan and it should heal up a short while later. I talked it over with my chain of command and in December of 2004 I went under the knife.

2005 turned into the year of hell for me and my eye was to blame for most of it. You see, double vision was supposed to be a good thing. Why? That meant my brain was still using my eye. After things healed up my eye would go into its proper position and thing would be good. That never happened. After six months things got bad. The double vision was making me nauseous and I was having dizzy spells whenever object at high speed moved from eye to eye. I tried toughing it out as much as possible but by the end of the year I was sent home from Afghanistan to get more surgery.

Little over a year after this whole thing started I had two more surgeries which put me back to where I was before this whole thing started, mostly. If I'm tired from a long day of work, sometimes the double vision will be there. A good nap takes care of that.

I think it was a valuable lesson learned. If it really doesn't need to be fixed, then don't.

I don't blame any one but myself for all the trouble I went through. I'm the one who said yes.

Discworld Noir: An Exercise in Futility.

Update 12-19-18

Here's some videos about the setup and beginning play. This does work on the latest versions of Virtualbox and React OS.

https://www.virtualbox.org/
https://reactos.org/







Update 3-21-18

Futzing around with ReactOS. Seems pretty stable. Played all the way through the intro and past Lewton and Carlotta's office banter with no crashes. AT FULL SCREEN! Now trying to figure out how to get the sound work consistently. Unfortunately on the rare occasion it does there's what sounds like a reverb on the voices.

Update 1-18-15

I spent some time in the past week loading up Windows 10 and trying out Discworld Noir. It was pretty frustrating at first because my test machine for some reason doesn't like DWN. I did everything. Even went into the registry to reroute all the paths and rename the file on the C drive. Let me tell you what, Windows 10 is not easy to learn for people who have been using Windows for about 15 years. (Any particular reason why Accessories needed to be renamed and moved to the bottom of the Start menu?) The test machine was a failure.

During the weekend I loaded Windows 10 on my main machine and Discworld Noir worked about as well as you'd expect. On a new game you have to play in windowed mode until you have control of Lewton then you can go back to full screen. An interesting tidbit for loading saved games I learned is that when you are on the title screen you can press F1 to bring up the menu and load a game that way. No crashing at full screen.

I did do some checking into the Debug Mode I heard about and couldn't find any results other than a forum of people more devoted to this game than I. No specifics on how to enable Debug Mode. I'll be honest, while I do like the game, the only real reason I continue to do such research on it is because it is the number one draw to this blog. Far surpassing sprites, foxgirls, magical frauleins, and bipolar vampire chicks.

Update 10.5.14

Ran a couple of tests on a tech preview of Windows Ten. Don't bother trying to install Discworld Noir. It is now too unstable to play for long. The only way I could get it to go is by clicking the "tin3_dxd.exe" file on the CD. Then it would crash randomly. The Playstation version does seem to work fairly decently. Just have to figure out how to properly configure the plugins.

I have no plans to mess with it beyond that. Maybe after the retail version of Windows 10 goes on sale I'll try to see if I can get Discworld Noir to work through a virtual machine.

Update 8.10-21-13.

Turns out I have been over thinking it the whole time. (Never thought I'd see the words "I" and "over thinking" in the same sentence.)  All you have to do is install it normally. Here is the catch: each and every time time you want to play it you have to click on "New Game." On top of that you need to hit Alt and Enter to put it Windowed Mode. Then hit Esc until you have control of Lewton. Now you can go back to full screen and press F1 to load a game. So far I have had only one crash to desktop, but that was totally my fault. I was trying to look up the Registry values in my Windows 8.1 test machine and compare them to the ones on my Win 7 machine.

You see I have been having an issue now for years trying to get Discworld Noir to run on my particular Win 7 rig. Turns out I needed to fix the entries in the Registry. Since I run 64 bit the keys are in a different place.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Perfect Entertainment\Discworld Noir
 After adjusting the "Paths" the game played fine, almost. Had to do the same process as detail above. (Note "Wow6432Node" Also note that this may (will) not represent your setup. I got involved in trying out the L-Space fix. On top of that I used ISOs I downloaded instead of the original disks I used on the 8.1 machine. I don't have the foggiest idea why it is this way in Win 7. I always test the 64 bit version of Win 8 and never had a problem with the game in that sense.)

On another note: I kinda sorta suggest getting the Discworld Noir no CD patch. I scanned it as it was downloading, I scanned it after downloading, I scanned it after unzipping, I scanned it after patching tin3_dxd.exe. So far nothing bad has happened. Makes the game much less of a hassle to play and I swear makes it a little more stable.

UPDATE! UPDATE! UPDATE! 6-23-2013!

NEW ROSENKREUZSTILETTE SLIDESHOW IS NOW UP AND RUNNING!

In other news: Discworld Noir is now up and running on Windows 8.

Here is what you need:

VMware Player

Windows 98 SE (Boy have those prices gone up.)

VBE9X

SBPCI_WebDrvsV5_12_01

direct_x_9c-redist (Optional. I got the game to work without it.)

(I made sure to save copies if they should ever disappear off of the live web.)

Step 01: Install VMware Player.

Step 02: Set memory to 64MB and HDD to 5GB. (You can set it higher if you want.)

Step 03: Install Windows 98 SE on the virtual machine.

Step 04: Place VBE9X and SBPCI on Win 98 Desktop.

Step 05: Right click My Computer, Properties, Device Manager tab, Display adapters, double-click listed adapter, click Driver tab, Update Driver, Next, make sure “Search for a better driver...” is selected, click Next, deselect “Floppy...” and select “Specify a location,” click Browse, navigate to VBE9X folder and select “Uni,” click OK, keep clicking Next until done.

Step 06: Restart. (I forgot how much Win 98 loves to restart.)

Step 07: Double-click SBPCI and install.

Step 08: Restart, again.

Step 09: Install Discworld Noir.

Playing Discworld Noir:

When you start a new game you will need to hit Alt+Enter immediately after clicking on “NEW GAME.” For some reason during the opening sequences the game will crash to desktop. The graphics will be screwed up, but this is the only way to get past the crash zones. Once you see (if you can) Lewton standing in his office hit Alt+Enter again to go back to full screen. 

(Press the Esc key often to warp past all of this.)

I have not played the whole game so I have no idea where else the game may crash. So employ RPG Rule #1: SAVE OFTEN! Then there is a small issue with sound. The voices just aren't quite right. On my test machine they sound is if they are talking into a cup. Then with headphones they had a slight electronic sound to them. Oh well. It now works.

That is until Windows 9.

Be sure to click for a larger view to a thrill.

 Now back to your regularly scheduled and very wrong blog post.

What in the world ever made me think that I could play this game on Windows 7 and Windows 8? Well, the fact that I am playing it on Win 7. Now I'm not talking about the PlayStation version. That works on Win 7 and 8. Surprising since the emulator I use is about seven years old. However, while the PSX version is a more polished game, the PC version is more fun and easier to play. It was designed for a mouse not a controller.

The PC version of Discworld Noir presents a very unique challenge to play on modern systems. Hell, it was a chore to get it to run on Windows 98. Most of the conversation I found tended to center around running it natively or in DOSBox. That talk was several years old and didn't discuss newer operating systems.

So now I come in. I'm having a fun time playing this game on Win 7 I want to tell the whole world about it. Now comes a challenge. You see I don't have your standard setup that most people have. Most just buy their systems off the shelf. The most common version of Win 7 is Home 64 bit. The most common version of Windows 8 is Windows 8 64 bit. I wanted to give a clear concise set of instructions that anybody can follow to play Discworld Noir on their machine.

After about a day or so I gave up. I did get the game to play, but it ran like crap. I tried many different setups but each one failed in some way. I'm not going to bore you and describe each one, I'm going to to skip ahead to the ones that actually had some success. On Windows 7 using Virtual Box with Windows 98 installed. On Windows 8 using VMWare and Windows 98. In both instances I had to use an independent set of video drivers that really do not work all that well. The sound would be static-y or the video would be choppy. (By the way: VMWare doesn't have audio drivers for Win 98.)

I was disappointed.

Okay, now how am I playing Discworld Noir on Win 7? You see, Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 does work on Win 7 Pro and Ultimate. It has the drivers you need to run Windows 98.

What is the point in writing about a failure? Well, I'm hoping that some day someone a whole lot smarter than me may see this and go “Oh hell, all he needed to do was this.” Then comment in on how to fix things.

There are some bonuses to having done this project. I had to work with Windows 8 quite a bit. While it didn't win me over, I found it to be not as bad as I thought. There's this myth running around that Win 8 is just Win 7 with a Start Screen. No. No. I could not get Microsoft Virtual PC, WindowsVirtual PC, or Virtual Box to work on it. (Update: VB does work now on Win 8.) I found that the Start Screen to be really nothing more than the Start Menu with the functionality of the desktop.

I got introduced to a nifty little program called MagicISO. At first it's not obvious how to use it, but I was able to figure it out after awhile. The free version is fine for about 99% of everything you need to do. I had to use ISOs because Win 98 doesn't recognize thumbdrives and I have never been able to get shared folders to work.

The most important thing I did: After all these years I finally went out and bought a real copy of Discworld Noir.

Veteran's Day 2012