The Orion Nebula

Hi. I've been playing Master of Orion II for years, but up until now it was on a Mac. I recently got a new computer, still a Mac, but how they are designed now doesn't allow for playing games or other things from that long ago. Luckily I am now able to run Windows, so one of the first things I did was buy the PC version of the game.

I am running Windows XP, and have been able to run many games with it, including much more recent and processor-intensive titles. But whenever I try to open MoO2 the screen goes black and then I get the error message "ORION95.EXE has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience." The CD I used to install the game didn't install the DOS version.

There aren't many games I'd be willing to pay good money for when I already own them, but MoO is one of them. It's one of the best PC games I've ever played, and I'd hate to lose it. Thanks in advance for any help.

I have not heard of that error message before (well, I dont play win version anyway) but I would first check if some files of your MOO2 CD are corrupted. So I would try the MOO2 demo here.

When it works it should be easy to replace your broken lbx files.

What kind of XP do you have? 64bit? DOS wont run directly there. So I recommend to use DOSbox: DOSbox Guide

Windows doesn't even recognize the demo file as an application, it won't run.

I seem to have a newer copy of the game that only installs the Windows version of the game. Would there be a way to manually install the files necessary for the DOS version?

Otherwise I'm going to have to scour eBay to find a Windows 98 install CD and try it in that, because I'm gonna find a way to play this game. This is one of my favorites and I'll be damned if I'm gonna lose it.

I think the most easy way is using DOSBOX.

Maybe a new installation of XP helps too, maybe other hardware is needed (videocard, mainboard ..)

You havent answered, but the only guess I have that this is caused by an XP 64 bit edition. So try the above mentioned DOSbox guide.

Instead of the first step you should just copy your entire CD to your harddrive (and make sure it includes also rkernel.com).

Well I got it up in DosBox, but it runs incredibly slow. It's so slow and the cursor moves so slow that I can't even click on New Game. It's been running for about 5 minutes and the credits haven't even reached the top of the screen. The cursor moves slowly and erraticly, not at all in sync with my mouse movements.

And I doubt it's the 64-bit version of Windows, as this computer isn't 64-bit.

Nevermind. I tried running it in the OS X version of DOSbox, works flawlessly, once again proving the superiority of the Mac platform javascript:emoticon(':P').

Thanks for all the help you guys gave me. Now I'm off to play me some MoO2!

So by inference Orion2 does run acceptably fast on OSX/Intel? On my OSX/PPC and Linux/PPC (ibook G4), it is always as slow as in your first description.