Tales of the Rampant Coyote

Adventures in Indie Gaming!

Played Eschalon: Book II or Din’s Curse Yet?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 22, 2010

Have you downloaded and played the free demos of Din’s Curse or Eschalon: Book II yet?

If not, why not this weekend? Unless you are on dial-up. Or really hate RPGs. In which case, you have a good excuse (and if you hate RPGs, you probably hate that half my posts are about ’em, huh?)

Seriously, when I’m talking about what cool stuff indie RPG makers are coming up with – with miniscule budgets and teams of, like, one guy (or girl) and some contractors working for peanuts… these games are exactly the kinds of games I’m talking about. (Well, alright, this whole list holds the kinds of games I’m talking about, but anyway…)

Din’s Curse

Eschalon: Book II


Filed Under: Indie Evangelism - Comments: 4 Comments to Read



  • Anon said,

    I think your download page for Eschalon 2 has an error. It claims the software runs under W2K. I get an immediate “GetModuleHandleExW in KERNEL32.DLL” error when I try to load the game under W2K, and googling suggests that this is a standard failure mode for software run under W2K which requires XP or later. The company fails to list any system requirements beyond “Windows” on its site* or download sites; however–cough, cough–a warez .nfo that I saw while researching this issue claims that XP or later is required. I can only confirm that the demo doesn’t run under W2K.

    *Oddly, the game box image on the company’s site appears to claim compatibility with W2K.

    Side note: the people who answer this problem in the highly-placed google results are a rude, rude bunch. No, I’m not going to ditch a perfectly good OS for some middle-of-the-road software that really shouldn’t need XP.

  • Rampant Coyote said,

    @Anon – I’ve contacted Basilisk Games about the issue, and I’m waiting to hear back. I’ll post here as soon as we find out. Hopefully it’s something that can be quickly fixed.

  • Rampant Coyote said,

    Okay – Update on the issue. Thomas is looking into it. He’s contacting his core engine maker, as it is supposed to support Win 2K. However, he also offers this advice (which may not apply, but just in case…)

    ‘I can tell you that if it is crashing when he attempts to start the game, we have identified a problem with polling OpenAL drivers that we have no control over. You may ask him to look in his Add/Remove Programs list and remove any OpenAL drivers he sees, and make sure his audio drivers are up to date. This has fixed several “won’t even start” problems for my customers.’

  • Anon said,

    Thanks for the response. I don’t have any OpenAL drivers, though. I’m using the latest W2K drivers for my AMD 760-MPX chipset motherboard and peripherals. Unfortunately, the only updated audio driver I can find for this machine’s onboard audio is billed as working under W2K but throws an immediate “You need XP!!!” failure when I try to install it. Amateurish support like this is but one reason why AMD is a perennial also-ran to Intel.

    Eschalon 1 ran fine on this same machine and driver set. To compare some similar games, Geneforge 5 crashed almost immediately if I left the sound on, while Avernum 6 (on “the same” Spiderweb engine) had no sound issues.

    This machine’s graphics card isn’t very good–Eschalon 1 was just barely playable–so I probably won’t bother to disable the onboard audio and install a sound card to see if the problem goes away. I have enough paid-for games to play at the moment.

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