Will Afrika Korps work with Windows 7?

[patton778]

What it asks above. I had the game when it first came out...lost it, but would like to play again but I have Windows 7 now. I see the patch for Vista, just unsure about 7. Thanks for any help!

[Kanonier Reichmann]

Yes, it should work just fine.

I have CMAK on my Windows 7 machine and it works well on it even without the Vista patch. There are very occasionally graphical glitches but they don't happen too often so I'm happy with the occasional annoyance of this without having to purchase the patch which then puts a DRM on the game.

You may have to apply the patch for your system depending on how it handles the game but it's only $5, which I figure is reasonable to be able to play this great game despite the annoyance of a DRM that goes with it. I had to adopt this approach with my CMBB game which always had the graphical glitches with my system, no matter what.

Regards

KR

[Blazing 88's]

Yes it will work, as Kanonier mentioned. If you can, set your monitor or graphic card to display a 4:3 ratio otherwise the graphics will be distorted to fit the wide screen.

[Redwolf]

I'm only missing fog on win7. Somebody posted here that installing random directx downloads from MS fix that. But it wasn't specific enough for me to jump on it.

A problem is that the game is limited to 1600 by 1200, and each one individually, with a 4:3 aspect ratio. So if you have a 1920x1080 monitor you are screwed because now you go to 1280x1024.

Back in the elder days people claimed they had it working widescreen but even if so, you effectively can't control anything in CMx1, it's all some crazy autopilot stuff when it comes to screen resolution.

[Schrullenhaft]

If you have an ATI/AMD Radeon video card, then you may want to purchase the 1.04 patch (which does use a different copy-protection system than the original release's disc-based system). There is a particular bug with the AMD Catalyst drivers and the 1.04 patch seems to indirectly solve it (by using newer DirectX calls that the previous 1.0-1.03 versions did). There is nothing else that the 1.04 patch addresses other than updating some DirectX calls so that newer video cards and their drivers might support the game a bit better.

As others have mentioned the CMx1 series only supported 4:3 ratio resolutions with a maximum of 1600 x 1200, so a lot of newer widescreen monitors may stretch the image out (to display on the entire screen).

As Redwolf pointed out, fog graphics are missing in Windows 7 (and Windows Vista and newer). To my knowledge the video chip developers dropped support for fog-tables in their newer drivers since it was no longer a current feature of DirectX 10 and later (developers are supposed to use different ways of displaying fog than fog-tables). The 'effect' of fog is still there, it just isn't visible and the 1.04 patch does NOT change this.

[Fenris]

The stretching ain't too bad IMO and is easy to get used to.

You can usually control how aspect ratio is displayed by playing with the scaling on either your monitor on graphics card. On my nvidia card control panel I can change the scaling under desktop size and position settings so it's either stretched to full screen on at the correct 4:3 with black side bars. Personal preference I guess.

Lack of fog is a bummer but doesn't break the game. It's purely a display thing though, your units still suffer reduced line of sight etc.

I didn't require the Vista patch. Bought the game as an online download, it's version 1.03 according to the splash screen.

Have fun

-F

[Redwolf]

FWIW, any enterprising programmer familiar with the Microsoft DX crap can probably fix fog permanently. The fog APIs are pretty straightward and can be translated into each other. All you need is a little preloaded DLL.

[Streety]

Other solutions to the stretched screen is to wear very strong reading glasses (back-to-front if necessary) or simply turn the screen at an angle to your line of view.

And for fog you can either squint or drink too much (bad for your health of course) or tape a piece of tracing paper over the screen (two pieces for thick fog) leaving a gap at the bottom for the in-game interface of course.

Or stick with my solution in the absence of Battlefront's no longer supporting CM1 (though they still sell it): I keep my cranky 4:3 WindowsXP rig going, purely for CM1!

And you can keep plugging away at them Redwolf, but I'm still waiting for them to fix that other highly annoying error that goes all the way back to CMBO (and still hadn't been addressed by CMAK 1.03) - the random map roads problem (you know, where the game often fails to generate the correct country road bend where it meets a city street). With such basic failures one can only dream about a widescreen or revised fog (so try my cures!).

[Redwolf]

The solution to the stretched screen is to set the monitor to not stretch on non-native resolutions. That can be done both in the monitor menu or in the nvidia-settings program.

[altipueri]

@Streety

Agreed - I have a few old XP laptops just to play old games. You can pick them up pretty cheaply if you don't already have some.

Of course there's always that sickening feeling every time you start up - knowing that there are only two types of hard disk - those that have crashed, and those that are going to crash.

[Streety]

@redwolf

Yes I, know. It seems you didn't see the lack of seriousness in my last message.

@ altipueri

Much Agreed. And at least I "know" XP, and so my nursed, cursed, aged and freezy, increasingly blue-screen-loving e-machines rig groans onward, each day could be it's last...