I ordered American McGee's Alice from eBay and it seemed to read just fine when I put it in my computer. The autoplay menu worked correctly and allowed me to install the game, but when I double-click the icon to start it (or when I click "play Alice" from the autoplay menu), a loading spinner pops up next to my mouse and then nothing happens. The program seems to silently crash immediately after opening. No error messages come up and I don't even see the splash screen.
My graphics card drivers are up to date and it doesn't seem to work under any compatibility settings either (I am running Windows 7). No one else seems to have this issue – am I going crazy? What could be the problem?
Best Answer
There was recently a security update by Microsoft implemented for Windows 7 and 8 that breaks native compatibility with a very large handful of old CD-based games, namely anything with SafeDisc or SecuROM write protection built in. This security modification is built in to Windows 10 and cannot be worked around. The following is a highly abbreviated list of potentially affected games:
The solution for this problem is actually pretty simple (Windows 7 and 8 only). Simply re-enable the driver service disabled by the security update and start the service. To do this, open a command prompt as an administrator:
Run this command (with the exact spaces) to reenable the driver's service:
You should get a
[SC] ChangeServiceConfig SUCCESS
message. Then run this command to start the service:Then open the game and it should work! To be "safe," you can stop the service by restarting your computer or using the command:
If you don't want to have to start this service every time you turn on your computer, you can set the configuration to
auto
instead ofdemand
. According to the security update, this may potentially leave your computer at risk for some virus attacks though, so use caution while this service is enabled.