Public Commander Keen Forum

I bought Duke Nukem II on 3D realmz online store. I got a little EXE called "duke2r.exe," which is supposed to self-extract the contents of the game onto my computer. It opens a little window and I click "Setup", and it forebodingly opens a DOS window. It says "This system does not support fullscreen mode. Choose 'close' to terminate the application" and quits. There is no way for me to easily open it up with DOSbox, and I tried going into the properties of the command prompt to change it to "fullscreen" on the options and that did nothing. I chose to pay $10 of good money on this instead of pirating so I deserve to play this game I could use some help here please...

PS: I'm using windows Vista

Use DosBox.

Didn't I mention that I tried using DOSbox in my first post and it didn't work? I thought I did...

The thing is, the actual exe ISN'T a DOS-based program, but clicking the setup button on it starts a DOS thing, and there's no way for me to choose to use dosbox when it opens it up... it sounds confusing I hope I explained it well enough

Well technically you could just download an illegal copy since you already payed for it and it would be just the way of getting what you payed for.
But if you feel that bad about it email 3DRealms and ask for an alternate version, that is packaged in a zip or other non-self extracting file.

I sent 3D realms a few polite, help-requesting emails. And uh... I sort of didn't want to admit this to you guys at first, but I already tried using pirated Duke II, but it wouldn't work so I reluctantly resorted to paying for it (I kept getting a message called "Critical file FILE_ID.DIS missing" or something).

Another solution might be to send the program to a non-vista machine and use it there, then bring the extracted duke folder back to my computer. I could go to my mother's house..... or ask one of you guys to PM me for assistance with this

if you downloaded duke 2 it would be legal as you did pay for it
if you want i can mail you my original version of duke 2

Sure why not?

you have a pm

Why is it hard to use DOSBox? Just copy your exe into C:\ then load DOSBox, and run it there:
Alternatively most games just check that FILE_ID.DIZ exists, they usually don't care what's in it - just create one in Notepad with some junk in it.

i already send him a copy of my duke nukem2

I've got WinRAR and when I right-click on a self-extracting exe there's an option to open the file with WinRAR so I can extract the files to a place where I want them. Maybe this also works with duke2r.exe.

memsys wrote:i already send him a copy of my duke nukem2

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

I don't think WinRAR will work either, the files are usually Apogee's proprietary installer (when you run them they normally spit out a PK-ZIP self-extractor which you could right-click on, except the installer runs it and then deletes it anyway so there's no need.)

Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

Haha. I second that.

Just in case anyone runs into this problem...

You can extract the installers from the SFX archives (eg. "duke2r.exe", "wackyr.exe", "wolf3dr.exe" etc.) from the Apogee webstore with WinRAR (and probably 7-Zip). They will work within DOSBox after extraction. DOSBox can't handle the SFX archives because they're made using WinZip (why, Joe? WHY?!).

In that case you could just use the DOS version of PKUNZIP, as it will extract self-extracting .zip files, including those created by WinZip. Most platforms have an unzip utility that still works on self-extracting files if you can't run them natively.