Getting Oregon Trail II (2) to run on Windows 10 64 bit without DosBox

oregon-trail-iitechnical-issues

I've been struggling for the past 3 hours to get this game working without dosbox or a VM, and so far I've managed to work out every kink. The game is working fine, minus one thing:

Quicktime

The nightmare that is Quicktime has utterly crippled me. Anytime I try to cross a river "FATAL ERROR: Failed to Register Quicktime Window" hits, and it goes down. If I delete the movies folders, it just stalls out where the movie is supposed to play. Newer verions of Quicktime have no backward compatibility and installing QT32 from the disk works for playing the files, but does not correct the issue.

However, since I can get the correct version of Quicktime working, and the game itself is working, I'm sure it's just some hook location looking the wrong place or similar.

Does anyone have an idea on how to fix this? Or an alternative for 1998's version of quicktime? Or some small trick that I'm missing, anything. I'm so close I can taste it, it's just Quicktime crippling me.

Best Answer

Had this exact same problem. Oregon Trail II would stall when playing a movie on startup, or when crossing a river.

Find the file OREGONII.INI in the application directory. Make sure the rsrcpath is an absolute path, including drive letter, and ends with a slash. Example:

[cdrom]
rsrcpath=C:\MECC\Oregon Trail II\DATA\

Just a note: as OP mentioned in their own answer, you can skip the QuickTime installation completely.

However, if you do this, game will have a black screen during startup (usually there would be a little QuickTime animation with the MECC logo).

Game will not freeze, but it will never move past the black startup screen. To continue, the window has to lose focus (ALT + TAB to another window), return to the game, the theme music will begin to play, and will load the main menu.

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Best Answer

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