I have both Castle of the Winds games but I have a windows 7 operating system. Whenever I try to start COTW an error message pops up saying that it's not a valid win32 application; thus, it won't start. Any idea what's going on and how to fix it? I really would like to play it on my computer.
I'm guessing that The Anonymous guy is using 32 bit win 7? or maybe he upgraded his Vista... I've got a fresh Win 7 Pro and can't get CoTW to work... I'll try it on my Win 7 Ultimate 64... Well that failed too. Doesn't recognize 16 bit apps on the 64 bit version of Windows 7. I just wanted to play it for Nalstalgia's sake
You are more than likely running Windows 7 64 bit, which is completely incapable of running CotW natively.
There is a couple solutions out there for you:
If you are running Windows 7 Pro or Ultimate, you can get the free Windows XP virtual environment, and once that is setup you install CotW and play there. (This is what I use).
Here is the link to that: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/download.aspx
The 2nd alternate, which has some issues, plus difficulty setuping up properly, but I have done it once before when I was trying to find the solution, is to acquire a copy of Windows 3.11 (or 3.1), download & install Dosbox (see http://www.dosbox.com/).
From there, you would run dosbox, do some funky magic and install Windows 3.11 into Dosbox, and then run Windows 3.11 from inside of dosbox. From there you can play CotW.
Albeit, that method I had some performance problems and random lock ups.
