Installing Heat on Win7 64 bits

[BurnOut]

Morning guys,

First of all, thanks all for your help, I really appreciate it

Next, it cant be a resource issue, PC is two months old and graphics card has 896MB of memory, power supply is 600W, it could probably run properly heat in each of its four cores with no problem.

Raybee: I did install the essentials, so it should be patched to 1.80, then I tried with the exe you provided, no W2000 message, but still the same problems.

Game is ABLE to run, as proved by the fact that I can play the Winston Cup directly from the CD, main problem seems to be that for some reason its not being able to see there is the GroupC mod installed and it loads default stuff

So summarizing, the facts are:

- The game runs from the CD (So win7 CAN run heat)
- There are no resource problems
- Using Heat Essentials + Group C mod

Next shots will be

- Swapping part.res from Group C to heat main folder
- Trying the patch.bin Ray posted

And last of all, if nothing else works:

- Using my girlfriend's computer to play Heat , even if that means she will end up playing Sims 3 in MY computer, but oh well...

[Administrator]

Oct 22, 2009 9:42:18 GMT 2 BurnOut said:

Next shots will be

- Swapping part.res from Group C to heat main folder
- Trying the patch.bin Ray posted

Mmmh... no bad idea. If all else fails, this should work. But you'd have not only to move PART.RES, but all mod specific RES files to run folder. And probably cars as well

Would be a standalone GroupC install then ;D

[raybee1970]

Did the Group C mod go to this path when you installed it?

C:\Program Files\Hasbro Interactive\NASCAR Heat\GroupC

If not, you may want to try doing a search on your computer for "sauber.car" and see where Win7 put it at.

Doing the search for the sauber.car file should show you where all the rest of the Group C files are, and you can try moving all that over to the correct path, if it didn't go where it should have.

And since we know the original game works ok, and Group C is giving errors....maybe try installing another mod and another track.....just so we can pinpoint if it's a mod problem, track problem, Heat problem or Win7 problem (it could be all 4 problems...LOL) ;D

You could try one of the mods from here at Speedsims, or one from The Mod Squad...or whatever you want to try. It wouldn't matter which mod, just so we can know it's not an error within the Group C mod itself.

But before all that, just do that search for the sauber.car and see where it put that file, since its a Group C file with a unique name.

Just hang in there....we'll all help get you going again, once we get all that normal stuff figured that we're trying to guess at from our homes here. ;D

[BurnOut]

As Radiohead would say, everything is in its right place mod wise, but wont harm to check with another mod.

Karl: would you mind posting a list of files that should go in Heat's main folder for Group C to work? I dont really mind having a stand alone installation for it since Im not planning to run anything else.

[Administrator]

That should be easy :

- copy all RES and CAR files from mod folder to run or Heat base folder
- copy driver.txt to Heat base folder

All the remaining stuff should be optional

[raybee1970]

Carlos,

One other thing I thought about asking you. Have you tried installing Mod Launcher 2 and then try and see if Group C shows up in the list of mods to choose from....then launching the mod through it?

themodsquad.uni.cc/modules.php?name=Downloads&d_op=viewdownload&cid=17

When you are installing Mod Launcher 2, just be sure that when it asks you to browse to your Run/Data folder, that you double click on the Run folder when you find it, so the program will do right.

I checked the GroupC folder I have here, and didn't see a shortcut to launch the mod with, but did see a .bat file that would sort of act as a shortcut in a way....so maybe Mod Launcher 2 will solve that.

Most of the new mods now are made to use ML2 anyways....so it'd come in handy for the future.

[BurnOut]

Today's chapter and season finale ;D

Ray: Yes I had installed ML2 right away after seeing the outdated version that came with the essentials (you guys should update it! )

Anyway, I tried swapping part.res to heat's main folder - still the same error, but now I knew thanks to Karl that it still kept looking for the file without finding it, even though it indeed was there.

So after some investigation I discovered that every time I tried to launch heat, it would create a Hasbro Interactive/Heat folder structure in another Program files folder, the one Win7 uses for older programs, named Program Files(x86).

So I moved everything there and ta-da! it worked!!

Main issue was that even if I leat Heat install in its default location, (Program Files), it would still look for core files in another place (Program Files(x86) - thumbs up for Win7!)

Also, having Win7 show folders localized with virtual names dont help at all - when I tried to create a 'Program Files' folder it would tell me it already existed (lol!), until I found Program Files was disguised as 'Archivos de Programa'...

Now I have a complete mess of heat installations everywhere, Im gonna try to get everything cleaned and once Im positive about the steps required, I'll try to get everything together for a mini-guide.

Case closed, thanks all for your cooperation!

[raybee1970]

Hey....well that's great, Carlos. I am so glad you got it all figured out and working. ;D

And yes, please do write up a guide for everyone on that. It will come in handy, and if you don't mind us posting it, we'll be sure and make that a sticky thread...so we can point folks to find the answers on that.

And I wish we could update the Essentials install to include ML2 and install it all together at once, but Oleg made all that stuff and knew where everything went and all that.

I wish he was still around, because that would be an excellent request to have him make up a new one. If anyone has spoken with him lately, have him drop by and see us, and let him know that if he has some spare time, to hook us all up with a new Essentials package with an all in one install (Heck....he could add in WinResTools Wizard too, while he's at it....just package all the useful tools in one swoop) ;D

But anyways....that's great news that you have it working and got it all figured out. I knew if we kept asking questions and tried to follow you along (like we were on your computer with you) that it'd start working eventually, once we found the main issue....LOL

There still seems to be an issue for down the road though, with installs going into the old "Program Files" as opposed to the new location of Program Files (x86) in Win7 though. Hopefully we wouldn't have to start making 2 types of installs....one for XP on back (and Vista) and one for Win7.... because that will end up taking up a ton of space on our servers to have 2 separate installs for different operating systems.

Maybe when you get it all cleaned up, and can do a test, see if you can explain in your guide, the best way to work with the standard installs (like we've been using) in the future.

With me being on XP, and all the users who have had issues with Vista and me trying to help by guessing on things I wasn't familiar with, it would be great to have a Win7 guide so they can have that to go by, instead of me trying to ride along that icy road....LOL

[DusterLag]

Well I was going to add only one thing.. but it looks like you got it all solved...

For a 32-bit program (NASCAR Heat) to run on a 64-bit operating system it needs to be located in the (Program Files (x86)) folder otherwise all of the files need to be edited to be run as 32bit individually.

This applies to any 64-bit OS, including Vista & XP.

Sorry I couldnt get to this earlier...

[Cholerix]

By testing with various fresh mod installs on my Win 7 notebook I ran into trouble as even when there was a massive update on the files, always old ones got loaded by the game.

Full Heat and mod de-installs didn't help.... neither a search for the old corrupt drivers.txt that always got loaded - there was no search results. And according to this, after deinstalling, the PC was clean. Nonetheless each fresh install again showed old old drivers.txt and started to drive me crazy

Until I noticed DusterLag's post about that VirtualStore folder. Where a full Heat install had survived each and every deinstallation So if you EVER run into a problem with some mod or with Heat and update for example drivers.txt, or championship schedule, or anything else - check that user specific VirtualStore folder. Or even better, delete the Heat install there

[Deleted]

thanks Kalr! Now I know why my vista laptop has just as much memory as when i uninstalled Heat on it...

[triz]

maybe a side issue but i had a problem with win 7 using the carswapper util in ML2... I had to put ml2 in xp compatibbility mode do let it swap the carsets in IRL Platinum Mod.

Just my 2 cents in case someone stumbled upon this too.

Triz

[Deleted]

well you could swap them manually.

[triz]

Jun 11, 2010 23:41:37 GMT 2 @bmxtwins said:

well you could swap them manually.

that would render the ML2 tool totally useless now doesn't it???

I have made my system with a dual boot solution because to be honest i got sick and tired of the irratic behaviour of Windows Vista/7 regarding older games. I rather just install XP next to Win7 and play games in Windows XP without problems (LFS also seems to have network issues when running it on Win7) and i dont see any advantage running Win7 for these games. Its useless. The games dont use Directx 10/11 at all anyways. And since one wants to run Windows 7 that means ur harddrive is big enough to have a 20GB partition reserved for XP.

[Cholerix]

Jun 13, 2010 10:13:41 GMT 2 triz said:

Jun 11, 2010 23:41:37 GMT 2 @bmxtwins said:

well you could swap them manually.

that would render the ML2 tool totally useless now doesn't it???

Well, yes, that's what the user-concept of Win7/Vista basically does, at least partially
As Win7/Vista don't save/install files where ML2 expects them mandatorily to be - which is why ML2 never worked on my system even though it's XP. But I don't have mods where ML2 thinks they have to be. So imho no flaw of flaw of Win7/Vista, but rather lack of flexibility of ML2