(also applies to Black & White 2 : Battle Of The Gods)
I recently have had problems playing these games, as they would sometimes crash during the initial startup. I eventually traced the issue to my portable hard drives not always ‘waking up’ in time from sleep/standby, in order for the game to verify I still had the original installation files.
If you have this same problem, a simple modification of the batch file used to run these games should sort your problems.
Where the batch file contains the commands
MountDT4.exe
Wait4IM.exe 0xC044ED7E
runner.exe
Insert a pause command between MountDT4 and the Wait4IM commands, so it looks more like this
MountDT4.exe
pause
Wait4IM.exe 0xC044ED7E
runner.exe
You can of course also put
@echo off
At the beginning of the file, if you would prefer not to see the commands displayed at all.
Although the Wait4IM command should pause the loading procedure until all files are accessible, for some reason, on my system at least, this only works intermittently. Make sure you save the batch file with the original extension – .BAT , and try to use notepad, rather than Word, to ensure no formatting characters are introduced. When you load the game, wait until the hard drives have woken up, and then press any key – the game will now continue to load.
Leave a comment if you need a hand with this.
(Please note I do not condone software piracy. Personally, I hate having to insert the original CD each time I want to play a game, so I make an image of the disc, store it on a hard drive, and instruct the game to refer to that image instead.)