Install blues – Clive Barker’s Jericho

Continuing the theme from my last post, I tried to install my boxed copy of Clive Barker’s Jericho onto my PC as it’s a game I never completed and I would like to now take the chance to actually finish the game. Once again, it’s a game that isn’t currently available on any digital platform for some reason, neither GOG.com or Steam.

Popping the disk in, I am unable to run the Autorun menu on the disk as it requires Adobe Flash, long since discontinued of course. Fine, I next tried to run the setup.exe file directly off the DVD, only to be hit with a User Account Control prompt telling me that an administrator had blocked access to the program, with no option to override and continue the install – see screenshot below:

Unfortunately, what has happened here is that the installer file was digitally signed by CodeMasters, the original publisher of the game. This is great, as it goes a long way to prove that the file is legitimate and isn’t malicious. Except there’s two problems – the signature is using SHA1, an algorithm that was deprecated by Microsoft a good few years ago now for security reasons and secondly, the signing certificate expired in 2010, whilst the rest of the chain has either expired, been revoked or both. I’ve only ever encountered one other piece of software that had this kind of problem and in that case, I gave up trying to get it installed. In this case, this was a game I wanted installed so I was more motivated to find a solution.

The internet wasn’t directly helpful as I couldn’t phrase my search query correctly to get a proper response. However, one post did lead me in the right direction eventually. Basically, enable the built in Administrator account in Windows 11, log in as said user and run the installer that way. To my relief, I was able to do so and install the game successfully. Once complete, I logged out and back into my normal account and disabled the Administrator account again.

To run the game, simply run the Jericho executable from inside the Bin folder of the install location and the game runs. The only other thing to watch out for is to make sure that the Nvidia PhysX legacy package is installed, as the game needs PhysX to run. Thankfully, unlike Medal of Honor Airborne, Jericho doesn’t install the old Ageia runtime by default, nor does the installer hard link it as a requirement before continuing.

This time horrible old DRM wasn’t to blame thankfully, but it’s still highly annoying to have to jump through the extra hoops to get the game installed. The game is long since abandoned by now of course, but unless it ends up on GOG.com where it would get a new installer, the game will continue to have this extra installation hoop to jump through for anyone who wants to play it.

LATE ADDITION: I discovered a small tool called delcert, which you can download from the XDA forums. Simply copy the install files off the DVD into a folder on your PC, copy and paste the delcert.exe file into the same folder and from a command line type delcert.exe setup.exe. Delcert will strip the signature off the executable, leaving you with a file that you can run as normal. Install the game using the setup file and all should be well. Since the game DVD is a read only medium, you have to throw in the extra step to copy the files to a local disk where you can modify files.

Retro Gaming blues

One of PC gaming’s biggest selling points is that there is an absolutely incredibly rich back catalogue of games reaching back decades at this point. Thousands upon thousands of games in every possible genre and in dozens of world languages, released by studios big and small all over the world. This is truly one of the great selling points of PC gaming, but it comes with a downside that doesn’t seem to get a lot of coverage that I’ve seen, but of course the internet is a big place and I don’t frequent the gaming sites the way I used to when I was younger.

For myself in particular, I am not even really talking 90’s games all that much but rather games made in the mid to late 2000’s. The thing is, the game engine itself more often than not will run even under Windows 11 x64 fine, but getting the game and getting it installed is by far the more difficult challenge. Let me explain…

Until the major rise of Steam and other digital download services, most gamers got their games on optical media – CD or DVD – and thanks to rampant piracy in the industry, publishers turned to copy protection systems such as SafeDisc and SecuROM amongst many other systems. None of these systems made headways in truly curbing piracy, but they left behind an unintended toxic legacy: legally playing these games years later on modern computers.

If you were someone who bought a lot of games on physical media and built up a collection, chances are there are games you own that are not available on any digital download service such as GOG.com for whatever reason. This means that the only way to play the game is to install it from the original disk. Unfortunately back in 2015 or so, Microsoft issued patches that totally kill the ability of SafeDisc and earlier versions of SecuRom to work. These protection systems will not work at all on Windows 10 and 11 and if you fully patched an older Windows 7/8 retro gaming PC, they too will not play these games. The only option left to you then is to find a crack so that you can run the game without having a disk in the drive. Of course, this is presuming you still have a PC with an optical drive in it – so very many computers no longer have optical drives at all.

Let me use an example of a game I own: Medal of Honor Airborne. The game uses the Unreal 3 engine and whilst it is a good 15 years old now, it is still more than playable. However, I had a terrible time installing it on Windows 11 off the disk:

1. The setup process struggled mightily to go past a point whilst reading off the disk. The disk is not faulty or rotten, but neither of my Blu-ray drives wanted to get past this point. I had to copy the files to a folder on a hard drive and install from there to get the game installed.
2. The setup process is hard coded to install a now ancient version of AGEIA PhysX, which will not work if you already have a modern Nvidia version installed. If the setup process cannot install it’s included PhysX, it will abort and refuse to continue.
3. To get around this, I had to remove my existing PhysX, install the game with its included version, remove that and then install the Nvidia PhysX legacy package, which lets you run older games whilst at least having a more modern runtime than what was included with the game. Lastly, I had to reinstall my modern version of PhysX as well.

Apparently, the version of the game that is available on the EA Play platform doesn’t have these hassles, but I specifically wanted to go through the manual install process to see if I could work my way through the hassles.

Another game that I have is Pariah, made by Digital Extremes, using the Unreal 2 engine. The game installs fine, but cannot run with the disk in the drive as it uses SafeDisc. This game is not available on any digital platform for whatever reason, so the only way to play it is to download a crack to circumvent the dead copy protection, which I duly did. I have no moral qualms about that, as I paid for the game and I have all the original packaging. Is it my fault that the game can’t directly run in modern Windows? No, so I am fine with using a crack.

I would like to say that GOG.com does an amazing job of finding, fixing, stripping all the DRM and releasing all sorts of older games, but as wide as their catalogue is, there are plenty of games that aren’t available unfortunately.

It’s easy to be nostalgic about older games and maybe feel concerned that a service like Steam has become the metaphorical 800lb gorilla, but it really does make gaming easier. No need to worry about finding and managing patches manually, installation guaranteed to work and many other benefits. Don’t get me wrong, I would always prefer to get my games on physical media so that I always own a copy of my game plus have a nice manual and any other included items, but I realise that the industry will never really go back to that method of distribution again. I suspect that the current gen of gaming consoles might be the last to include an optical drive in them and once they are replaced in a few years time, the only way to really own your games anymore will be to hope its available on GOG so that you always have an offline installer and can back up the install files at will.