I know, I know, to date you have tried ten thousand times to install Outpost 1.x onto your machine, to no aval. Lucky you you have winXP (Home or Pro) with Service pack 2. Congradulations all of your older games are now irrevicablly useless. Matter of fact worse then that, alot of your newr games are useless to.
Today is your lucky day, for you have just stumbled across a person who knows how to fix your problem.
The following are instructions for installing and using outpost 1 on a winXP with SP2 installed. However just replace Outpost 1 in these instructions and it will generally work for all other older games as well.
1st some minor background to bring everyone up to speed.
Your game will not install, or if it does refuses to play on XP with SP2 because of 2 things.
1. Believe it or not SP2 has a slightly different format, (actually file allocation system) then SP1 did. Which unlike all past winblows products this one fails to be 100% backwards compatible. The idea was to make it more secure, however it also killed about 50 trillion older applications in the process, as well as a ton of newer ones to boot.
(If you have now read that and your looking here for tips on a new product, produced after 2004 goto your programs vendor, if they won't help drop me a PM and I will see what I can do for a work around.)
2. Because of SP2 remarkably useless security software, IE the firewall that refuses to actually turn off even when it says its off as well as the ever present and fully uselss anti-spy ware progie, your computer now thinks that all software older then 2002 make, if spamware, or just plainly bad to have around.
Thus the delema, thus why you are here, and thus why I am bothering to annoy you with all this typing. You came to me, the least I can do is annoy you before giving you the info you so badly want.
You are now left with 4 options. They are, format it, hack it, fool it or forget it.
The most reliable is always format it. IE format your system, and restart with XP SP1. Most do not wish to do this, but it works about 80% of the time. Follow what ever process you use to format your comp, reinstall XP SP1, and install the game. Then install what ever else you usually have onboard.
(If you need or want instruction on how to format send me a PM I will send you a walk through.)
Hack it, is usually a pretty usful way, exspecially if your one of those lucky sods who had XP SP1, but upgraded to SP2. Simply remove your SP2 updates, by going to control panel, uninstall, and then find the SP2 updates, and click the ye old remove option. While your in there, trash the anti virus program, and your on board firewall. Reinstall those after you have the game up and running. Set your screen to 256 colors, and 800*600. This one worked well for me.
Don't want to do that? Or worse your poor comp, came with SP2, and SP1 is not really an option for you? Then you can fool it. For this you will need an emulator.
(See here for one.) There are alot of them avalible, basically they make your computer temporarily think that its been sent back in time, and really is a 486, or 386, with nothing useful on board in the way of ram of Hard drive. It fools the program to thinking you really have windows 3.11 installed on your machine. You really do not, and emulators are prone to failing at critical times in your game for no appearent reason to you, or fail to function in odd ways. (My personal favorite, no music, but lots of speach sounds.) Needless to say you will want to try a few before you settle for one, find one ya like.
Not good enough, or did not work? Make a post, or read the next paragraph.
Unless you are running multiple OS's and failed to remember that by now, or forgot about that old 486 in the basement corner, that amazingly still works. You have now reached the forget it phase. Take the Outpost 1 disc, put it back into the really old Sierra Disc case, and put it back into the rack. I would say sell it, but eventually like any good old game the desire will time and time again strike you and you will try and try again, until it works to your satisfaction.
Hope the above helped at least a few folks.
