Emperor's Tomb PC problem

I just installed the PC version of Emperor's Tomb on my Mac via VMware Fusion. The game runs but I get no faces at all on any of the characters. And on the start menu, the door that the camera zips through on its way to the shrine at the far side of the room doesn't fully render, it just appears solid green.

Any suggestions? I installed a patch I found with no luck. And the demo version (which I also installed) behaves exactly the same way.

does your system have the right requirements for the game?

Sankara25 said:

does your system have the right requirements for the game?

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Excellent first question and succinctly put.

Sankara25 said:

does your system have the right requirements for the game?

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Uhm... I'm running on emulation as I already said. So my system completely trumps the requirements, quite obviously.

The only thing that may be off would be some of the 3D rendering stuff. Again, EVERYTHING works fine except that the characters are all headless-- so my guess would be that it's something on the side of VMware's compatibility software. So my request for help would be help in that department. Anyone know what I might do about it?

ResidentAlien said:

Uhm... I'm running on emulation as I already said. So my system completely trumps the requirements, quite obviously.

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The thing with virtual OS emulation is that they don't just emulate the software - they also emulate the hardware. There is a certain predestined hardware configuration tied in with the emulation software. So whatever one has under the hood of the actual machine matters jack squat when running a piece of software in a virtual environment. Because the virtualization softwares are meant to run in a wide variety of computers, the emulated hardware setups have rarely much juice for anything else than glorified desktop use.

In other words - unless you're an uber computer whiz who somehow manages to rewrite WMware's hardware emulation code, there's very little you can do to solve this particular problem.

Finn said:

The thing with virtual OS emulation is that they don't just emulate the software - they also emulate the hardware. There is a certain predestined hardware configuration tied in with the emulation software. So whatever one has under the hood of the actual machine matters jack squat when running a piece of software in a virtual environment. Because the virtualization softwares are meant to run in a wide variety of computers, the emulated hardware setups have rarely much juice for anything else than glorified desktop use.

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Yes-- exactly what I was getting at. I'm aware of how emulation works.

Finn said:

In other words - unless you're an uber computer whiz who somehow manages to rewrite WMware's hardware emulation code, there's very little you can do to solve this particular problem.

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And that's my answer, I suppose.

Guess I can always go submit this error to VMware and hope they issue some sort of patch.

ResidentAlien said:

Guess I can always go submit this error to VMware and hope they issue some sort of patch.

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Another option would be to shop around for an old PC.

Stoo said:

Another option would be to shop around for an old PC.

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Lol. That's not an option at all.

If it's anything like getting The Infernal Machine to work properly ...

...well, I gave up in the end.

It seemed like more trouble than it was worth. Yet, there's always the nagging, stubborn feeling that the game ought to be made to work.

Beyond getting the latest patches for both emulator (and game if that's even a possibility?) and reinstalling the game itself, I would have no clue as to curing the problem.

Montana Smith said:

If it's anything like getting The Infernal Machine to work properly ...

...well, I gave up in the end.

It seemed like more trouble than it was worth. Yet, there's always the nagging, stubborn feeling that the game ought to be made to work.

Beyond getting the latest patches for both emulator (and game if that's even a possibility?) and reinstalling the game itself, I would have no clue as to curing the problem.

Click to expand...

The game's playable. The only game-halting glitch I had so far was in the demo on the tram level-- I died. The car dropped. But the game never reset-- I could control the gun still and planes would zip overhead and continue to shoot at me. And I do own it for the X-Box as well... so it's really not a huge deal. Just annoying.


And Infernal Machine was always a ***** whenever I tried to get that working on the PC. Luckily I have the N64 version.

This is weird--

I was digging through the folders earlier looking for anything related to textures that I might be able to mess around with. And I found two levels in the levels folder that were like pre-build test levels, a rope-swinging course and a whip swinging course. I launched those and... Indy's face suddenly worked! But only in those levels. And, I'm assuming for test purposes, the character model is nearly entirely black save for when you get near dynamic light sources in which case some detail will be "illuminated." Anyway, long story short-- one of those times I messed around with this, I plugged in a USB controller then started the control menu to enable the controller. I resumed the level and just like that his face was gone. That is the only time I've gotten his face to disappear in those test levels.


Does this give anyone any sorts of ideas?