Theme Hospital - Problem With Displaying Videos

[SubwayD]

Having a rather annoying problem with the game Theme Hospital.

The videos, such as the logo/intro movie and the one used for the menu screen (the weird little professor guy) don't show when I run the game. I can hear them, but there's no picture. The login screen shows as expected, plus that weirdly stretched gameplay video works just fine. It's only the intro and menu videos that don't work right, the latter making it impossible to navigate into the game itself.

Additional error nonsense:
Trying to run the DOS version of the game results in some strange errors with DOS/4GW. No idea if this could be connected to the problems with the Windows version, or if I've just not configured DOS right... which is no doubt a larger issue in itself.
If this could be relevant, I'll make note of it.

The facts:
I'm using an old CD budget version of the game, EA's Collector series. My monitor is a 21 inch CRT and I'm running windows Win 98se with the system I'm trying to play on. All the hardware is pretty much to the spec of a gaming machine from the end of the Win9x era: 2 x 256 ram, Pentium 4, Sound Blaster Live! and APG GeForce 5900 Ultra.

Troubleshooting so far:
Thought it might be a resolution issue of some kind. To test if this monitor could display all the wacky resolutions of older games, I installed Quake and ran through all the settings. Everything worked in some form or another, so unless Theme Hospital runs its videos at some custom res, I'm not sure that's the issue. And if it was, then surely there would be more information on it available.
Looked into the video format, thinking there might be a codex problem, but Smacker seems self contained.

So far, the only other game that has had the same problem is Claw (who remembers that game?). Same issue sort of issue when trying to run the videos in that game: Sound, but no picture.

The thing that I can see connecting the two is that they use the old .smk format. Yet other games I've tried have no problems with the format.

Any ideas what could be going on here?

Tried searching online for info on this issue, but the web has since been swamped by people asking how to run the game on XP or higher operating systems, and all the old help pages are long gone.

Hoping to try and fix this without resorting to nuking the whole operating system and starting over in the off chance that some tiny detail I missed somewhere is upsetting the whole thing.

And the real punchline is the game works just fine in DOSbox, but it feels like giving up to emulate it on a system I built solely for running old games.

[Adam]

Hi,

Are you still trying to get this working? I've never had any problems with the DOS version. It's the Windows version that gives me problems .

You say you get strange DOS/4GW errors? What do these errors say? It's possible you're running out of conventional and/or extended memory. What are the contents of your autoexec.bat and config.sys files?

And if you have enough hard disk space, you may want to copy all the files that are accessed from the CD (I believe this includes some of the video files) to your Theme Hospital directory on your hard drive, and then change the path in the config file (in the Theme Hospital directory. You can't miss it! ) to the Theme Hospital directory on your hard drive. That may help if it's being caused by CD access problems.

[SubwayD]

Yeah, I'm still trying fighting the game every now and then.

Still no video in the Windows version.
For the DOS version, I can get it to run if I don't set up the sound. That said, I've also done some other tinkering with the Autoexec and Config files, which may or may not have helped get it running.

Still, no sound has worked with a few troublesome games so far, which leads me to believe that the soundcard is probably up to no good.
Shocking! A soundcard screwing everything up? Who has ever heard of such a thing!? 

I'm not sure what I should do about it. I'm guessing it's wonky emulation? I've no idea if there are native drivers for the SoundBlaster Live series.

Will investigate further.

[Adam]

For the video in the Windows version, try running dxdiag and see what that says.

For the DOS version, what sound settings are you using and what sound drivers do you have installed in Windows?  What are your SB16 emulation settings and do you have any IRQ or DMA conflicts? Have you tried running the game in DOS mode, outside of Windows?

Nit sure what you mean by native SB Live! drivers. If you mean for DOS games then no, emulation is the only way to get sound working.

And you have 512MB RAM right? I think Windows 98 might not like too much RAM, but can't be sure as I've never run Windows 98 on a system with that much RAM. It's possible you have so much XMS available it's confusing the game.