KOTR Kotor on Vista

[svfinest]

Kotor on Vista

 

Trouble shooting Knights of the Old Republic on Windows Vista

 

I will give brief and general solutions to trouble shooting your Kotor defects and malfunctions on Windows Vista. First of all, my preferred solution is to have a separate tower for running Kotor (it can also be used to back up spare files). I have an old school gaming rig. Anything AGP has given me the least problems with settings on Kotor 1 and 2.

 

1. Kotor CD loads but doesn't play on vista -

a. Install game and use as administrator. This is the easiest and lowest maintenance fix in most cases.

b. The game was installed and worked before but no longer does.

b.1. This is caused by the following - a hardware change (i.e. you upgraded your graphics card to one that does NOT intergrate with netframeworks 1.0) (you asked Windows to tally up your hardware performance score)

b.2. Securom warning - hardware was reconfigured (CD rom may have been swapped to another sata/ide port)

c. The Kotor CD has the least problems on hardware that was produced in the Windows XP era. Vista uses PCI-X cards that do NOT focus on intergrating with netframeworks 1.0 like an AGP card does. Intergrated Vista era motherboard graphics chips have more success with playing Kotor than dedicated PCI-X cards of the same era.

 

2. How to fix any of the above problems beyond the administrator fix.

a. When Kotor is installed make no hardware changes. Otherwise you risk compromising playing Kotor. Components for it do not get better than what was already made in 2007 and prior.

b. It worked on an AMD 5000+ 64 processor with an intergrated graphics card. When I installed a dedicated Quadro FX 4600 PCI-X it stopped working. I didn't do much trouble shooting at the time.

c. The best I have seen it run was on an AMD 2000+ with 2 GB ram on an Invidia GeForce 6800 AGP on an old Emachines AM32 motherboard (but that was on Windows XP). It would run on Vista but you CANNOT ask Windows to grade your hardware score or else it will optimize your system and netframeworks 1.0 will be virtually ignored. After that Kotor will most likely not work.

d. I currently have an old school mini tower with a Pentium 4 2.4 ghz processor Quadro FX 3200 AGP and 3 GB of ram powered by 600 watts on a P500 motherboard running Vista. This is a little choppy at time. With the Emachines setup I mentioned in (c.) everything was so smooth and vivid it looked like you could put your hand in the monitor.

 

3. A Securom warning means you will have to reboot your whole operating system and eveything else you installed on your computer in order to play Kotor over again. If you don't have these problems and you have never ran into them then we have to assume... that the force is with you.

 

4. (a) Install operating system or reboot from scratch

(b) Install all PCI/AGP hardware and software one at a time (each time you install a PCI component and its software turn off your CPU and install another)

© install all remaining drivers and software (including Netframeworks 1.0 if using a dedicated graphics card)

(d) Make sure all hardware components are where and how you want them to remain for good

(e) Install Kotor.

(f) Trouble shoot any start up issues in the start up application.

 

5. Once again the checklist - (1) AGP Graphics Card (2) Netframeworks 1.0 maybe even 2.0 (3) Make sure Kotor is the last thing you install (after all hardware and relative software) (4) Last but not least a reboot disk

 

If this doesn't work for you then you may have to try again. You can post a comment or question as well. I hope the best for you!

Edited April 22, 2015 by svfinest

[SithHolocron]

If folks are still interested in getting KOTOR1 or 2 working on Vista and Windows 7 by using the original discs, you might want to look at this thread at Deadly Stream: Get KOTOR 1/2 Working on Vista and Windows 7