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Darkstone FAQ for the PC

Text taken from: nosilleg's blog - Setting up Darkstone on Windows XP x64 Edition and Vista

Darkstone is an Action RPG released in 1999 that I've recently had a desire to play again. However, the installer refuses to work on Windows XP x64 Edition (and possibly Windows Vista x64, tho I haven't tried), so I figured out how to do a manual install and I'm going to document that here.

UPDATED: From the comments below, the game appears to run on all versions of Windows; Windows XP x64, Windows Vista x64, Windows 7 x64 and the 32 bit equivalents. Paths may vary between Windows editions, but shouldn't be too difficult to get correct.

I didn't have another install of Darkstone to work from, but most of the process is easy to guess and I've figured out enough of the rest so that the game appears to be fully functional.
Copy everything from D:\Data\ into C:\Program Files (x86)\Delphine Software\Darkstone\.
Copy D:\music.MTF into C:\Program Files (x86)\Delphine Software\Darkstone\.
Copy D:\voices1.MTF into C:\Program Files (x86)\Delphine Software\Darkstone\.
Copy everything from D:\mdata\ into C:\Program Files (x86)\Delphine Software\Darkstone\mdata\.
In RegEdit make sure the following key chain exists HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SOFTWARE\ Wow6432Node\ DelphineSoft\ Darkstone\ CurrentVersion\ Darkstone.
Make two string values under that key of DataPath and SavingPath and set both values to C:\Program Files (x86)\Delphine Software\Darkstone\.

This should get Darkstone up and running and allow you update with all the patches.

I used Process Monitor to figure out the registry keys. There is an additional “language” key that Darkstone checks, but I don't know the values and the game defaults to English anyway, so I haven't worried about that. I'm sure someone with a real install of the game could provide accurate information, but this should at least get Darkstone running.

Text taken from:nosilleg's blog - Setting up Darkstone on Windows 7 x64

Darkstone is an Action RPG released in 1999 that I still play from time to time. The Darkstone installer fails on newer versions of Windows with the error “Cannot launch install”. Thankfully this is only a problem with the installer and the game works fine when manually installed. Here are the instructions for installing Darkstone on Windows 7 x64.

In the following instructions the drive for the CD is D. If your drive is a different letter, please use that instead.
Create the folder
C:\Program Files (x86)\Delphine Software\Darkstone\
Copy everything from
D:\Data\
into
C:\Program Files (x86)\Delphine Software\Darkstone\
Copy
D:\music.MTF
into
C:\Program Files (x86)\Delphine Software\Darkstone\
Copy
D:\voices1.MTF
into
C:\Program Files (x86)\Delphine Software\Darkstone\
Copy everything from
D:\mdata\
into
C:\Program Files (x86)\Delphine Software\Darkstone\mdata\
Go back to
C:\Program Files (x86)\Delphine Software\Darkstone\
and right click on Darkstone.exe and click Properties. On the Compatibility tab check the box next to “Run this program in compatibility mode for:” and select “Windows 98 / Windows Me” from the dropdown.
In RegEdit create the following key chain
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SOFTWARE\ Wow6432Node\ DelphineSoft\ Darkstone\ CurrentVersion\ Darkstone
and make sure you're in that key before creating the following values.
Create a string value of DataPath and set the value to
C:\Program Files (x86)\Delphine Software\Darkstone\
Create a string value of Language and set the value to
ENGLISH
Create a string value of SavingPath and set the value to
C:\Program Files (x86)\Delphine Software\Darkstone\

This should get Darkstone up and running and allow you update with all the patches.

There are some minor glitches, like parts of speech being skipped very occasionally, but I can't be sure those weren't bugs back in 1999. My original post covering installing Darkstone on Windows XP x64 has comments from readers about Windows Vista and networking issues, which I haven't tested. The instructions above are the only ones that I can vouch for.