Cant run El.exe under win98SE

[Indianos]

I searched the forums and i didnt found a solution to my problem.

If this problem has been solved before post the topic.

I will explain my situation:

The Eternal Lands is the only game that crashes my pc under WinXP.

These games bellow work fine and never any of them crashes my pc and force it to reboot.

NBA Live 2003, NBA Live 2004, Mafia, Grand Theft Auto 3 Grand Theft Vice City, Call of Duty,Hulk,

Wolverine Revenge ,Fallout Tactics,Knight Raider, 4X4 EVO 2,Devil Inside,F.A Premier league Manager 2001,

Max Payne,Red Faction, Serious Sam The Second Encounter,Soldier of Fortune,Stronghold Crusader,

Terminator3 War of the Machines, Warcraft 3.

 

Before i had winxp installed in my pc and el crashed often(some times EL.exe only crashed but

most of the times EL.exe reboots the pc and crashes the whole system.)

So i decided to format the hard drive and put win98SE.

I installed again Eternal Lands el_170_install

When i try to run el.exe this error message appears:

 

 

The file EL.EXE is linked to missing export shell32.dll:SHGetFolderPathA

 

When i click ok to this message it displays another error message:

 

C:\Games\Eternal Lands\el.exe

A device attached to the system is not working.

 

 

My system features are:

Proccesor: AMD Duron 1.2 Ghz

Memory: 512 mb ram

Graphic Card: Geforce FX 6200 256 mb gigabyte

DirectX: directX 9.0 c

Sound Card: C-Media

 

I tested a previous version of Eternal Lands the 1.4.0 beta and it works under Windows 98 Second Edition.

(it runs the exe file and connects to the server but it is old and cant play with it)

The last version doesnt run at all.

 

With windowsXP Eternal Lands worked for me with a lot of crashes.

Now with Win98SE doesnt run at all.

I have the same pc the only differense is now i have win98SE installed and not WinXP.

 

Does Eternal Lands Supports Windows 98SE or not ?

[LabRat]

shell32.dll:SHGetFolderPathA is Windows 2000 or better. You can get a copy of it directly from Microsoft and see if it helps:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...;DisplayLang=en

[Indianos]

I downloaded the Shfinst.exe and i installed to windows system folder but it didnt fixed the problem.

How i can test the shfolder.dll to see if it is installed correctly to my system and if it is registered ?

 

I used this command i found searching with google:

Start >run>type

command

then type

regsvr32 shfolder

then press enter

 

 

and then a pop up window appears with this message:shfolder was loaded,but the DllRegisterServer

entry point was not found. shfolder does not appear to be a .DLL or .OCX file.

 

If i type:

 

Start >run>type

command

then type

regsvr32 shfolder.dll

then press enter

 

I get this message:shfolder was loaded,but the DllRegisterServer entry point was not found.

DllRegisterServer may not be exported or a corrupt version of shfolder.dll may be in memory.

Consider using PView to detect and remove it.

 

 

Edit:

I think that the latest version of EL.exe cant run under win98SE.

Is a way to add manual commands or edit a file in Eternal Lands installation folder so EL.exe is able to run again in win98SE like the previous versions of the game did in the past and dint display this message:

The file EL.EXE is linked to missing export shell32.dll:SHGetFolderPathA

 

In the site the game system requirements doesnt say that Eternal Lands doent work anymore under Win98SE and needs newer operating systems like win2k and above.

Edited January 7, 2009 by Indianos

[Gilrain]

tbh, using Win98 nowadays is a really bad idea.

Did you try running EL under WinXP in the 'compatibility mode' ?

And did you use newest graphic driver under XP ? cause EL uses OpenGL graphics, but most other games use DirectX.

 

i would recommend, reinstalling WinXP, putting newest drivers for all your hardware and see if it aint running, then solve the problems if there are any left.

 

HTH,

[Indianos]

I think that Windows98 Second Edition is good and stable system for old machines like mine.

Eternal Lands does not run under win98SE needs newer version of windows to run properly.(It cant find the folder path to create the Eternal Lands folder with the settings in the my documents folder .)

The 1.4.0 beta of Eternal Lands i tested before could run under Win98SE(it saves the settings at EL installation folder) but had sound problem (Kernel32) enabling the sound.

I searched google a lot of hours the last days to find a solution to my problem.

I found this site:

http://x86.neostrada.pl/KernelEx/

and i downloaded this file:

http://x86.neostrada.pl/files/KernelEx036.zip

This file replaces some DLL of the sydtem and is for all language versions of windows.

With this installer EL.exe runs like winXP and also has no sound problem(Kernel32 error ) turning on the sound effects under win98SE.

So with this patch everyone who wants to play games which run only under Win2000 and above will be able to run them under Win98SE and WinME.

 

 

So everyone who wants to play Eternal Lands under Win98SE and WinME download this patch.

Edited January 8, 2009 by Indianos