Video Games 101

I can't install the Dx7 on my PC, they give me an error message saying that it can't be installed on my OS, which is XP SP3, I have a geforce 8600GT, and since I can't install it, when I launch the game the screen starts giving me white stripes..etc...

Try the beta test version which can be found here:

http://forums.videogames101.net/index.php?topic=72.msg283#msg283

same problem ! plz It took me years to find this game agian :D !!!!!!! any solution !

I believe there is a problem with Nvidia drivers on this game.  All my ATI cards work perfectly, but my Nvidia cards caused random flickering.

Damn Nvidia.

Let me know if you can find a solution because at the moment, I don't have any suggestions or possible solutions.  I have already complained to Nvidia about the driver compatibility with this game, but they still have not fixed it. 

You should complain to them too! 

a Friend of mine told me that I cannot install DX7 on XP, but I'm not sure of this since most of you guys already have XP, I was thinking of installing Windows 98 or ME, these windows supports old DirectX versions, hope it works.

And one more thing, I can play it with no visual problems in SAFE MODE, but its SLOW AS HELL !!!

Actually i have Nvidia and it works for me   :P

What driver version are you using, and what OS are you using?  I saw flickering on XP with Nvidia drivers...

I hear that Fast Food Tycoon 2 works perfectly under Vista, which is strange, since most older games do not.

Again this is a issue involving the xp desktop settings, this is because of the limits of the game compaired to that of your system, use compatibility wizzard to set the game to run under win 95 with no desktop visuals. drivers and direct X shud not be an issue as they are actualy both backwards compatible.

hope this helps ya all

 PEace

No it's not.  It's due to all DirectDraw interfaces being deprecated as of DirectX 8.  So while most may still work some may not or some may not work as expected.

Only back to DirectX 8.

However for NVidia cards there is a workaround in XP.  If you bring up your display properties and select the troubleshoot tab you will see a slider for Hardware acceleration.  If you bring the slider down to the third notch from None or from the left on the slider then Fast Food Tycoon 2 will work as expected and will still use hardware acceleration so it won't be horribly slow as if you completely turned it off.  

There is also a check box on mine for write combining but I'm not sure if that really did anything or not.  If this does not work for you my advice is to start with the slider at Full and run the game.  Gradually bring the slider down and run the game each time until the game works as expected.  On my NVidia card (GTX 260) the game works at 3 notches from None or 3 notches from the left on the slider control.

I've looked into running this game in 16:9 and 16:10 widescreen but the bitmaps will all be stretched since they were designed for a 4:3 aspect ratio.  As it is the game looks fine on a 16:9 in it's OEM resolution.  To modify the screen res would probably require editing the binary and finding the DirectDraw call that creates the device.  I cannot find any configuration files for the resolution so this is probably the only option unless there is someone here who helped develop the game that knows more.

I've attached a screenshot to prove it works.

Thanks so much for this excellent information!  I too wish we could somehow get the game to use a widescreen resolution.  Unfortunately, there are no developers associated with this forum.  I wonder whatever happened to them  ???

I bet this game was made from another reality and somehow came into this universe. Such a great game with no support at all.

This is the ONLY forum for it!




Has anyone with a mac installed an older version of windows on it to see if it works? I know macs can run two OSs at the same time

Yeah, it is such a great game.  I wish it would be more familiar.  It's just fun.  Not sure about Macs.  Never used one to be honest. 

I'm finding it very difficult to play the game since I get the OVL error.  My 2005 Visual Studio JIT debugger tries to debug the application but since there are no debug symbols or source it only displays assembly language.  

I'm going to try to track down the OVL error b/c it is not related to AGP acceleration as some have stated.  I have a PCI-E card and I used the DirectX control panel to turn off AGP acceleration and it did not fix the issue.  I might be able to set my DirectX to use the debug runtimes and try to get a bit more information out of them when this error occurs but at the present I cannot track the issue down.  At present the issue appears to be related to either a null pointer to a DirectDraw surface (indicating the surface was not created properly) or a corrupted DirectDraw surface.

I'm going to try to run it through another debugger and put in some breakpoints and traces to find out where and why the error is occurring.  As well while I'm in the code I'll look for the DirectDraw calls to see if I can get the game into 16:9 or 16:10 resolutions.  I do not believe it will suffer from any of the issues that older 3D games do such as incorrect frustums, early frustum culling, etc. since this is a 2D game.  It should just stretch the bitmaps which I could live with - that is if they did not hard-code the positions of the on-screen buttons.  I seriously doubt they did but who knows.

Surprisingly the game handles lost device conditions better than some modern games.  ALT-TAB works like a charm which will make my task much easier.

Let me know if you make any progress.  Thanks so much for checking it out!  The community appreciates it.   :)

Can't wait to hear back from you.

I'm going to go out on a limb and throw out my idea. I know it is stupid, but has anyone tried changing their system clocks back a few years and playing the game? Maybe it has its own little y2k bug...