Heroes of might and magic v patch 1.41 eu

I know that a lot of older games keep their configuration in a. My first hope was that Ubisoft had changed the installation path compared to when the game was first released, that there would be an expected default install location within the expansion setup files that I could change to point to the correct location and it would all just work.

I had no idea how the installer worked. There were a number of files — Setup. What a name. Aha, thought I. Sadly not. In all of the plaintext files in the installer, there was nothing that appeared to indicate a default path that I could correct. Next up, I wanted to try to find that default path somewhere in the files. I wanted a minimum number of files to look through, so I deleted files in the install directory to see what the installer actually needed.

So — delete a file, run the installer, does it give that error message? If so, that file is unnecessary so move onto the next file. If not, then that file is needed, restore it and move on. I got rid of all of the subdirectories which just appeared to be support and autorun shite , the autorun stuff, data2. So it was in here somewhere. Many references to this expansion pack but only one or two to the original game and none of them seemed to be a path. That had to come from somewhere and if I could find that somewhere, I could work backwards and jump over the thing that triggers it.

Something somewhere has to be looking for the original game, and that something must have logic that I can tweak. Searching in plaintext failed, but it had to be there. It would appear that Installshield is a product used by a lot of old games to perform the installation process. After some searching I found UniExtract, the universal extractor which claims to be able to extract InstallShield Cabinet archives.

I install that and voila, I can extract the cab. It gives me some dlls, some bitmaps, some text files with EULAs in various languages and a few other files. Originalspiel nicht gefunden. The entire contents of value. At this point my partner piped up. She apparently explicitly asked Ubisoft for the German version of game.

I start the installer again and it offers me multiple languages to choose from. So I try another language. How about French. No jeu de base. Searching further, I learn that data1.

Maybe this is the error message file for the uninstaller? That German error message might have been a red herring, but it did at least give me another hint and another thread to pull.

I search… and it is! So this is the file that contains the logic used by the installer to install the file! How on earth am I going to get at it though? Look at it go!!!

Cheers, I owe you one. Time to start digging. Oh yeah — decompiled code is even harder to read than written code. At the end of that error message is the instruction abort;.

I make the tweak and try it. Have I stepped over the problem and hit another one? The decompiler handily provides checksums for every function so perhaps, the installer performs a checksum check before running?

I try some others. At a glance, it seems like the code is doing something with a series of strings, and if any one of the strings returns something, then it succeeds, otherwise it fails. It then returns either 0 or 1 depending on its success. Perhaps I can change that return 0 into a return 1 and it will install? Taking a look at AAE4 in setup. Searching around the file for other examples, that seems about right.

It is recommended to restart the map to continue playing a saved campaign game. To continue playing saved multiplayer or single scenario games, you may need to restart the program at the end of the mission. System Requirements 2. Installation 3. Changes in patches 4. Known issues 5. Troubleshooting 6. Technical Support 7. Legal information 1. Run patch installation file. Follow the instructions. A replier to my post on another site, a post just like this one, suggested I had the wrong patch version.

I disbelieved that because I had bought the game from amazon. In fact, small print on the bottom of the retail box suggested that I had a United States version published by Encore.

Reasonably, therefore, I had been trying to install the U. Nevertheless, a post on Ubisoft's support page advised me to check the game's manual to find what edition of the game I had. The Epic Collection did not come with a hardcopy manual, but in small inconspicuous text at the top of the digital manual I saw a note possibly indicating the manual came from the U.

So I tried the U. The patch installed. After that, the version 3. Life should not be so difficult. Somewhere, in the game or in the readme or at the beginning of the manual in clear and conspicuous text, or on the patch download sites, I should have been informed that the Heroes V Epic Collection contained the U.