Lease on Life

So a couple weeks ago on Amazon, I found a copy of an old computer game that Mister had enjoyed when he was little (Castle Explorer), but which Lamb kind of wrecked when she sort of exactly put teeth marks into the CD.

She was mad at her big brother.

Mister was upset and Lamb missed the game.

But I found it on Amazon cheap and ordered it. It arrived today and I tried to install it on Lamb's computer, which is my old XP machine with added memory to extend its life. It would not work. Checking the ReadMe file was completely unhelpful.

So I try it on my newer Vista machine. No go.

At this point, Mister remembered something that would have been nice to know a couple weeks ago. Namely, it would not work on his old XP machine that I sent to his mom's so they'd have a newer computer to use. Castle Explorer had run on an old Windows 98 machine. So just sending the game to my Ex's wasn't going to work.

As I'm trying to figure this out, I looked at the game box where it had system requirements printed--as if I'd have a blinding revelation for a solution.

As I'm looking at the system requirements--8 MB or RAM, etc., I had a blinding revelation for a solution. My old laptop!

It is old--8 or 9 years old when I bought it used. Windows 95. 20 MB of RAM and processor speed triple what the game requires. It weighs about 20 pounds, I think. And cost me almost as much as the new laptop I use.

I found it and dusted the removable CD drive, put it in, and managed to get it running and boot up Windows. I had to plug it in, too, since the battery is long dead.

I even installed the game successfully. Now, it seems a tad unstable and I had to reload the game at one point. But this may actually work. And to think I was so close to chucking this in the garbage.

Of course, this is why I'm gun shy about buying games for use on computers. Far too often they don't work because it is not being installed on the generation of machine it was designed for. Not once has the feature of emulating older versions of Windows ever worked for me. Now I prefer to buy games for use in the Wii where I know I won't be chucking money down the toilet.

But Lamb has the game. And Mister is helping her. And Lamb has another computer, it seems. The ancient machine has a lease on life with someone not even born when it was made.

UPDATE: Illegal operaton. It self-terminated and I had to restart the game. My hopes are dimming although Lamb is still not discouraged. It isn't the four bucks, of course. Just frustrating. Why do I even have to try to get an ancient machine to run this game when I have several newer machines that in theory have more than enough capacity to run the game?

UPDATE: A Google search led me to the company website that has a patch for XP. Of course, nothing is ever simple because Lamb's XP desktop isn't connected to the Internet. So I saved it to my computer and then moved it to a thumb drive. Tomorrow I'll see if I can run it on the XP and get this working.

Although at this point Lamb is going to be disappointed if she can't use it on the "new" laptop I just gave her! I think the old laptop has more than enough capacity, though. Pehaps it really just lacks space since it seems to run fine until it just dies. Maybe I have to mess with that aspect.