I love adventure games. I first got hooked on them in 1989 as a kid in Egypt. The first game I played (or, more accurately, watched other people play) was King's Quest 4, followed by Leisure Suit Larry 2. At the time, I spoke almost no English, and I learned a lot of new words from those games (in particular "Zounds!" from KQ4, when Rosella is facing the serpent that she must hypnotize). In Egypt at the time it was extremely hard, if not impossible, to get any kind of games at all. I played KQ5 as a teen, some of KQ6 and of Sam and Max Hit the Road, Day of the Tentacle in French, but that was it until the summer of 2001.
That summer was pretty lazy, as I was TAing one class every morning and had a free day apart from teaching and some occasional grading. After I downloaded (shhhhh) some of my old favorites to play for laughs, I decided to investigate all the other games that I'd been unable to play earlier. To be honest, I hadn't even heard of most of the classics I ended up playing that summer. At that time I had a laptop that ran Windows 98, so the only problem I ever ran into was the timing in some old Sierra games.
Then when I got a new computer my outlook changed. It had XP on it, and all of a sudden my carefree days were brought to an abrupt end. I spent a lot of time getting games to work in XP, and these pages collects some of the tricks I discovered along the way. I hope you find them useful.
Katia Hayati
Last updated October 23, 2004