Recently I had an interesting experience with Aquanox and want to share it here on the forum. Hopefully it will be of some use, especially for those few like myself for which German is out of reach.
To begin with - being very frustrated that I cannot play Deep Descent (my computer does not meet minimal system requirements), I decided to comfort myself by re-playing Aquanox 1 and 2 (have not played Aquanox 1 for more than 15 years, actually). Normally, I would play Aquanox 1 on one of my two retro machines running Windows 98SE (it is usually so much fun). This time around, the game viciously kept crashing to desktop - probably a bad driver issue, which I did not have the patience to resolve.
So I decided to install it on my Windows 10 x64 machine. My game is the original English CD retail version, which uses SafeDisc for DRM. Apparently, Windows 10 has problems with SafeDisc and SecuRom, so I could not start the game at all, even updated to latest patch 1.17. This site:
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/AquaNox
indicates that DRM-free game can be obtained from GoG.com. That was encouraging, except for the fact that I simply DETEST GoG and Steam. I hate these digital distribution sites. Out of luck, I left things as they were for some time.
A few days ago I was digging around in Archive.org for old Win95/98 software, which I collect as a hobby, and mostly by chance I came across of a disk image upload of the so-called MSI OEM version of Aquanox (never heard of it before). Seems like it is a version that MSI was offering bundled with its video cards back in the day. Out of curiosity, I downloaded a copy and installed it using the serial from my retail version of the game (surprised it worked). Things turned out really nice because:
- the MSI version does not have SafeDisc copy protection, it is DRM-free, and game starts under Win 10 without problems. I suppose this version is being offered on GoG and Steam as digital distribution. Bastardos!
- the game is version 1.18, which is probably better than the highest retail version - 1.17.
So I am currently enjoying (or at least trying to) playing Aquanox 1. Without applying compatibility settings to the game executable, the game crashed a few times to desktop. After applying Win XP SP3 compatibility settings, it is all smooth sailing, no crashing, no nothing.
There was another issue, which is kind of a problem, but can be resolved. Both the retail and the MSI OEM versions, once installed, cannot be uninstalled. The problem is again with Win 10, which does not like the game uninstall utility (unwise.exe). I deleted it from game folder, and copied there a newer version of this file - the uninstall went just fine. The newer version of the uninstall utility came from another game that I have installed on my computer - Galactic Civilizations II. My guess is that every version of this utility, as long as it is newer than the one which came originally with the Aquanox install, would do fine.
That's all from me at the moment, hope this info helps some other person. Those that can play Deep Descent - please enjoy it for us that cannot. And stay away from Covid.
Best to all
PS. I am uploading here the Aquanox 1 English walkthrough that I have been using ever since I got the game many years ago (how did the years pass on so fast?!). Please mind that I do not claim any credit for it - the author is Alan Chan ([email protected]); I just made some editing; adding missing stuff, formatting and correcting spelling errors (they bug me a lot). Hope this may be of use to some players, so enjoy
