Al Emmo on Vista Ultimate

[jonkjon]

I purchased Al Emmo and the lost dutchmans mine on 4-25-08 from Stardock on TGN and cannot get past the opening movie when playing on Vista Ultimate. I checked to see if i was running ffdshow and that was not the problem. I discovered that if i hold down the esc key when choosing a new game or to load a game, the movie doesn't play and i jump into the game. If i continue to play this way, am i missing anything in the game other than the opening movie?

[GameDevChris]

The movie files are encoded in MPEG-1 format, and FFDShow is usually the reason why it hangs in this manner. Though, I guess other instances could be due to other graphics or video card issues that we haven't been able to track down, or that are quirks that the individual's system has with the MPEG-1 format.

If you've tried everything and nothing seems to work, then as a last resort, you could try re-encoding the movie files to another format (like DivX) which works without problems on your system. A google search should find you plenty of programs that can convert video formats from one type to another.

The files in the game directory that are movie files are as follows:

Al_Emmo.023
Al_Emmo.024
Al_Emmo.025
Al_Emmo.026
Al_Emmo.030

Note: some of those files may not exist, depending where you bought the game.

Rename them to Al_Emmo.0xx.MPG. Next, encode them to a more compatible format (DivX, for example). And finally, rename them back to their original filenames and simply replace the files in your game directory with the newly encoded ones.

Alternatively you can view the original files in Windows Media Player, but they won't have sound. (The sound is stored in the game archive, not in the movie files themselves.) Though, they will have subtitle text.

Sorry about the inconvenience. The reason we couldn't include DivX versions in the game is because licensing the codec cost more than we could afford in our budget.

[jonkjon]

O.K. Wow! Thanks for the fast reply! I will give this a shot later tonight. I'll report back and let you know how this worked out so that others may also benefit.

[jonkjon]

I re-encoded the files as you suggested with divx. (I own the pro version.)That didn't fix the problem. I then played the movies inside of wmp and they are very brief. The logo for the game which i believe is the first movie to play doesn't appear to be complete. It's about 2 or 3 seconds long. The movie that hangs the game also stops in media player at the exact same location that it hangs in the game. The progress bar in wmp indicates that that is the end of the movie. I believe that these movie files are corrupt. Is there some way that i could download them? I have already tried to redownload the game from tgn and that didn't help.

@@@ EDIT @@@ Hold on....i can play the files with nero show time for some reason. But not with windows media player.......

[jonkjon]

O.K. That worked. I am still trying to figure out Vista after a year of using it! I couldn't get divx to recognize the last file there as a mpg but it did the first four just fine. Thanks again for providing such great support.
If you don't mind, i would like to post this over in the Stardock forums to help others. I think that this mpeg1 problem is plaguing a lot of Vista users.

[GameDevChris]

Great, thanks for letting me know. I'm glad it worked for you!

If the file Al_Emmo.030 exists, then it's usually just some kind of company logo movie that plays when the game first loads up. So long as all the other files encoded fine, then you should be able to view all cutscenes in the game.

And sure, feel free to post it over at those forums if this is a common issue on Vista.  Thanks.

[jonkjon]

One more thing on this that i discovered. I did some tracing of video codecs on my machine and found that, while ffdshow wasn't the culprit, a hauppauge codec that was installed on the machine was also causing problems. You can download this utility to help in disabling codecs that may be problematic. Hope this helps someone.