this game came out (i think) in 1998. it was still DOS based, and a year or so later they released Thief Gold, the windows version. this was one of the best games ive ever played. it was the first (and arguably the best) stealth action engine ever created, and was groundbreaking. it set the bar for every stealth based game to come out afterward. now then, this is a real pain in the ass to get to run on windows XP (cant vouch for vista, but cant imagine it would be easier). changing compatibility modes allows me to install it, but playing it always crashes to desktop without an error message, just the standard "thief.exe has encountered an error and needs to close, do you want to pointlessly tell microsoft about it?" there are thousands of posts all over the place with fixes that seem to work for some people and not for others. that being said, i dont want anyone to go out of their way to find a fix, as ive read a million possibles. does anyone actively play this game and can give any advice on how to get it to work on XP? also, this game was produced by Looking Glass studios, which no longer exists, but every post i find links to an affiliated webite ttlg.com (through the looking glass). either this server is very low capacity or there are constantly millions of people trying to access it, because i always get a network timeout when i try to look at the posts there. i think the answers can be found at the site, ive gotten through 1 or 2 times, but never to the post i need (of course =/). any settings i can change to maybe be more successful at connecting to this site? i know the errors stem from new graphics cards and directX configurations, and there are texture upgrade packages that can help, that only seem to be available at the looking glass site. so, if i can get to the site, i can probably fix the problem. but i dont want anyone to waste time googling fixes, because ive tried em all. =) i got a cracked version of thief gold, cant find the original DOS based one, as it might be easier to get working. EIDOS owns the rights to it, so i dont think i can post it here at digiex, but let me know if i can, because if youve never played it, you should. its a masterpiece. i considered possibly setting up a virtual machine booting windows 98, but ive never done that. is it feasible? the game had a sequel called Thief 2: The Metal Age, which was very good as well, also produced my Looking Glass. after EIDOS bought the rights, they produced a third installment called Thief: Deadly Shadows, which i've yet to play, but am currently downloading. the third gets mixed reviews, but the first 2 were extraordinary games. a summary for all this rambling: do you know how to fix Thief Gold to run on XP? (only answer if you already know, dont want to waste anyone elses time searching, as i'm able to tackle that feat myself) how can i connect to www.ttlg.com with any amount of success? how do i set up a virtual machine to boot up in older versions of windows? am i allowed to post the older thief games to digiex without it being considered warez? any help would be greatly appreciated. and if you havent played this game, youre missing out on a game that would easily make anyones top ten list. Thanks! =D
1] Don’t know how to get it to work on XP, I had a quick look on one site and it basically linked to the one you can’t access. It also mentioned once the game loads up bring task manager up and tell it to only use one cpu core. Im sure you have read that though, can’t really be of anymore help without quoting the websites you have probably read to you. 2] The more people who keep trying to connect to the domain the more chance people have of not getting on, it’s like when Digiex was very slow because of the Windows 7 beta, it got to a point where the web server just couldn’t cope with the amount of requests it was getting. It looks more like the webserver is dead/broken, for me it’s impossible to load the website even slowly. I would just keep randomly trying like once every hour if you have access to the net at work, hopefully you will get lucky at some point. 3] Quite an easy one, download Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 from: Download details: Virtual PC 2007 Its a free download, once you install the best is self explanatory. The more powerful your processor the better, the graphics card it emulates is not the best but it should be ok for a 10 year old game. 4] If the older thief games are not sold in shops / online or generally available that’s fine, I’ve had a quick look online and over here the only place I could find the first two on sale is ebay so if you wanted to upload them with any patches or instructions on how to get them working on XP / Vista that would be fine.
I actually have the same problem. Some time ago I bought the Thief Collection pack with all three games in it. The only one I could get to work was the third one, which I haven't played because I wanted to play the first two first. I have a slightly different problem though. I'm also running XP (SP2) and I can install the game without having to change anything. I can also run the game and access the menu, etc. But when I go to the training area (when the game actually begins) I just get a black screen and that's it. I have this same problem with Thief 2. You could try accessing the ttlg site through Google's cache. Just google for ttlg and click the 'In cache' link next to the url of the website. I personally never did put a lot of effort into getting it to work. I had a virtual PC running Windows 98 but I lost it.
i can run thief 2, with no problems, also without changing the compatibility modes. i think i'm running SP3. still, not much luck with thief 1, which is the better game, imo.