Funky stuff with Lara

Posted on December 17, 2001 @ 08:40 in General

I never played Tomb Raider when it came out, when I was running Win95 on a Pentium 100 machine with a 2 meg video card. So when I saw Tomb Raider The Trilogy for sale a while ago, I just bought it. Tomb Raider 1 won't run on Windows 2000, which is what I'm running on my box these days. It's a DOS game that will probably run under Win95 and/or Win98, but I couldn't get it to run under Win2000 at all. So for a while now I've been playing Tomb Raider 2, which did want to install properly.

laraanimation.gifI've advanced up till level 9 (I think, it's called Living Quarters), partly thanks to Stella's Tomb Raider walkthroughs. A walkthrough is a funny thing. I can imagine that in another situation a cheat or a walkthrough could turn the experience of the game not into a sense of accomplishment, but that it would actually strip that feeling away, like Peter Olafson argues in his thoughtful article. But right now, for me, the game is not about accomplishing anything, other than catching up on the experience of Tomb Raider. Filling a lack if you will. So reading how I should solve the timed run to turn off all the burners in 40 Fathoms saved me from running around that piece of the level for an hour until I had figured out the sequence of all the levers. It feels like I'm playing Tomb Raider the movie, which necessarily simplifies and leaves out some of the more intricate details of the plot, and I'm not reading Tomb Raider the novel, which does go into all that detail.

Now for the funky stuff though. Tomb Raider 2 installed without a hitch on Windows 2000 and Lara's been running around quite happily for a while, but I get these funky error messages when I try to move from one level to the next. Usually between levels there's a cut-scene, but I don't get to see most of them (I think) because the game quits and I'm looking at a dialog box on the desktop saying that "File such-and-so needs a newer version of Tomb2.exe to run (version 134488)" or something of that ilk. This is very annoying as you can imagine.

It gets weirder. I have 2 cd-rom drives in my box, one 48 speed Aopen cd-rom drive and one 12x10x32 LiteOn cd-rw burner. If I run Tomb Raider from the Aopen drive, from which I installed it, I will get the background music and the occasional cut-scene, but because this drive spins down real quick, the game almost freezes or at least jerks really badly when it has to load some stuff from the cd-rom. Also, if I run the game from the Aopen drive, it will pretty much quit between every level with the above mentioned error message. If I run the game from the LiteOn drive it's smooth as hell, no hickups, no freezes, no error messages between the levels, but also no in-game music and no cut-scenes.

That's pretty annoying. What I end up doing is play the game during the level from the Aopen drive, so that at least I get the in-game music and if I'm very lucky, I get a cut-scene at the end of the level. Save the game often, so that if it craps out, it's easy to get back in the saddle. Then, if it craps out during a level change (which is 9 out of 10 times), switch the cd to the LiteOn drive, go back to the last save point, finish the level, miss the cut-scene, save immediately as I reach the new level, quit the game, put the cd back into the Aopen drive and play on. *mutter*grumble*kick* Anyway, with a little help I made it about halfway through the game and I kind of dread going all the way... what if the game totally craps out on the final cut-scene and I don't even get a slightly satisfactory end to my Tomb Raider 'movie' experience?!

Update: Actually, what it says when I try to finish the Living Quarters level is: "FATAL: Level 10 (G:\data\deck.TR2) requires a new TOMB2.EXE (version 1255194) to run" with the cd in the Aopen drive. When I put the Tomb Raider 2 cd in the LiteOn drive, the level finishes and I proceed to the next level. If you happen to know if there is supposed to be a cut-scene between the Living Quarters level and the next one, feel free to drop me a line or post a comment. Also, if you happen to have a solution handy, I'd like to hear as well.

Comments and Trackbacks

  1. Thanks very much for posting this. It saved my life. Well, perhaps not exactly, but it did allow Lara's life to continue to the next levels. I encountered the same problem, and if not for your comment, I wouldn't have tried the CD in the CD-R drive, which worked like your other drive. Haven't found a better solution yet, but any solution is better than none.

    Thanks again,

    ET (also known as ET)

    Posted by ET on February 12, 2002 @ 21:23

  2. Thanks very much for posting this. It saved my life. Well, perhaps not exactly, but it did allow Lara's life to continue to the next levels. I encountered the same problem, and if not for your comment, I wouldn't have tried the CD in the CD-R drive, which worked like your other drive. Haven't found a better solution yet, but any solution is better than none.

    Thanks again,

    ET (also known as ET)

    Posted by ET on February 12, 2002 @ 21:25

  3. I know I had a duplicitous nature. Call me the twice posting man.

    Posted by ET on February 12, 2002 @ 21:26

  4. Cool :) besides, what's a couple of personalities among friends.

    Actually, I finished the game and got to see the final cut-scenes, so all's well that ends well I guess.

    Posted by Frank on February 16, 2002 @ 22:57

  5. I got the same probs no long ago,
    not to say yesterday.
    I bought TR2 at ebay.de (very cheap) and thought there should be no probs running it under xp. Fortunately I yet had some experience with making several old games run on my machine, so first of all it didn't take long to figure out which drive letter I had to choose (!!!) for my dvdrom to get sound & cutscenes.
    So far.
    But at the end of L1 I got these ugly MessageBoxes...FATAL...requires new tomb2.exe...blahblah.
    I didn't find a solution for this, neither on the net (including this page...*g*) nor did the TR2 patch work for me.
    After having tried different things (even to crack it...;-)),
    which made no difference at all, (I think) I found out that everything I have to do to get to the next level properly is to wait, at least at long as the stats-page music (or what should I call it) plays, better 15 sec. or so, before pressing a button. It seems odd, but I didn't get these errors again.
    This "trick" obviously works for the first three levels, so I'm quite optimistic it'll also work for those still to come.
    (and I'm not willing to play a TR2-marathon now, after having finished this game on psx 5 times...)

    grz M$

    Posted by Masterdealer on July 21, 2003 @ 18:57

  6. Unfortunately, waiting for the stats page music to play out didn't work for me (I waited at least 30 seconds). TR2 on Win2K still complains about needing a new executable.

    Posted by Stephen on October 14, 2003 @ 23:32

  7. I have the same problem Stephen, no matter how long I wait, the game still quits

    Posted by Simon on January 09, 2004 @ 00:03

  8. I also had this very annoying problem.

    Right click the TOMB2.EXE file in windows explorer and select compatability mode (XP) change to windows 95. This solved the problem for me :)

    Posted by Kieran on February 29, 2004 @ 19:42

  9. Thanks for that Kieran - you saved me! I was going slightly stir-crazy when I kept getting that error message and couldn't advance to level 2 (not familiar with PC games, I have played this on psx only) - just one minor glitch with that though, I find the game freezes momentarily now after small FMVs (picking up objects even can cause it), or it jerks through them. This is probably a stupid question, but how do you quit the game? I have to ctrl+alt+del

    Posted by Jen on March 18, 2004 @ 04:52

  10. Thanks to Kieran, changing the compatibility mode also works for me.

    Posted by edmund on April 15, 2004 @ 08:48

  11. Well i just ran into this forum out the blue.. any way i got the same problem with cut scenes..other than that evry thing works fine. Now if the game freezes evry time u get into a new area or pick sumthing up .. its cus its having to buffer the sounds.. all u gota do is go to disc explore and extract the data folder with sounds. and prob solved.. game wont freeze. As for cut scenes nuttin will fix it for me and i have tryed it all and no go..

    Posted by Yo-Yo on June 05, 2004 @ 10:30

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