Dungeon Keeper 2: How to run under XP/Vista/Win7

XP: Turn on Windows 2000 compatibility, Turn off Visual Design support (in settings dk2.exe).

Vista/win7: Turn on Windows 2000 compatibility, Turn off Visual Design support (in settings dk2.exe). Make sure no other background program is running as no process (probably d/l program - this will cause flickering Screen). Add "...\Dungeon Keeper II\dkII.exe" -softwarefilter -32bitdisplay to DK2.exe starting options.

If Black Squares instead of Textures are upcoming: Start Game. Go to settings ingame, go to graphics, disable Hardware support. start a mission. Now it must work. Leave Game per official exit.

if you are using a dual core, Start Game, press strg+alt+del, go to Taskmanager and disable cores until only one core is left for following processes: DKII.exe DKII.icd (this is for providing uncontrolled mouse moves ingame) Switch back to DK2 per TAB.

"HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Bullfrog Productions Ltd\Dungeon Keeper II\Configuration\Video" settings:

Screen Depth = 32
HighWalls = 0
if Game wont start without 3D Hardware enabled:
Screen Hardware3D = 4 (probably 5 if hanging up)

Hope this will be helpful

Your Keeper baSTARdo

Despite trying everything, all of which is said in this thread. The game starts, plays the initial cutscene, the menu's are there, just the background is black... and when you start a game, its a black screen, with the mouse pointer, and a cross in the bottom right corner. nothing i do seems to work, also hardware acceleration still is on even though i set the registry values... im begining to think it is my graphics card. I have a ati radeon HD 3200 onboard chip with the latest drivers, anyone have any suggestions?

where is Visual Design support? I can't find it anywhere, I have the problem where the game starts up, everything works but their is no game screen (toolbar and map all work)

Hi guys,

I tried pretty much every advice how to make Dungeon Keeper 2 work on my Windows XP (which took about three days, btw), without success ... it always crashes after random time. Seeing how many people have this problem and thinking it may never work, I gave up and decided to create virtual machine with Windows 98 to completely solve the problem.

Wrong.

1) First I tried VMware. I installed VMware Workstation 7.something, created a virtual PC, installed Win98, installed sound drivers (this was the hard part) and then installed Dungeon Keeper 2. Thought it will work flawlessly now, just maybe a bit slowly. It doesn't work at all. When I run the game, it crashes immediately, before the intro movie, with the message "Program performed illegal operation." Does the same with and without the patch 1.7.

2} When I gave up on that, I tried Microsoft Virtual PC. The process was pretty much the same, just the sound worked fine without any effort. I install and run (!!!) Dungeon Keeper 2 1.7, everything looks good. When I try to start a new game, after the loading screen, the whole screen goes black and it freezes. Some people talk about "black background" or "black screen, just the hand-cursor visible". This is not the case ... it was all black, without any sign of doing something. I then noticed that the "emulated" graphic card has about 8 MB of video RAM ... I think it might be the cause - too little of video memory - but I do not know how to change it.

I will appreciate any advice that will help me run this great game at least one of these ways. I'm getting desperate here, having tried plenty of both reasonable and obscure ways to make it work. Thanks in advance.

Sethiel

Sorry for the necro post, but I really need help on this. I recently got Dungeon Keeper 2 and installed it with patch 1.7 but when I start the game all I see is the screen with 'Dungeon Keeper 2 Its good to be bad' And it crashes to desktop. I tried a lot of settings including compatibility modes of XP SP 2,3 Windows 2000. I followed all the instructions I saw, but it does nothing! Nothing works...at all. Please help me out here.

I honestly don't know what I'm doing wrong. I installed the game, set it to Windows 2000, Turned off Visual Themes. Started up the game and nothing. Nothing came up, at all, blackness. I waited a couple minutes and nothing came up. Not the opening cutscene, not anything. Someone please know how I can make this work...

Can't unfortunately. The game wouldn't even get THAT far.

quote Syrith

For anyone still having problems I found the following on another website that worked for me. The game would load for me but everything except the menu would be black (unplayable).

After following these steps all the graphics load properly etc (no more black background) and it doesn't crash on startup. Only problem I'm still having is a slight amount of flickering around torches etc with the textures, still playable though from what I've seen so far.


1.issue: The game would go black on start-up and then immediately close.

1.solution: right click on the game's icon and choose properties. Select the compatability tab. Set the game to run in Windows 98 mode. Also check disable visual themes, disable desktop composition, disable display scaling on high DPI settings, and Run this program as an administrator. This should get you past the initial crash.

2.issue: In the main menu the background is black, and when you go to start a new game, all you get is an exit button on another black background, if you click randomly in the blackness you might be able to start a new game, but you will see nothing.

2.solution: The blackness is actually where the 3d content of the game SHOULD be getting rendered. This happens because the game was made for 3dfx or some older generation of graphics card. The solution is to set the game to use software rendering, but that may not work for you -- it didn't for me. What happend was, I would set it for software rendering, and it would ignore the change, I'd go back and it will still be set to use hardware acceleration, I could not figure this out. What I eventually did was go into the registry and change the graphics engine type from a value of 2 to a value of 4.

for the tldr crowd, it's this setting: HKEYCURRENTUSER - Software - Bullfrog Productions Ltd - Dungeon Keeper II - Configuration - Video - EngineID=4

Though there are other settings you may or may not have to monkey with. YMMV, etc.

Good luck.

Hope this helps =)

p.s to get into the registry open command prompt (run "cmd") and type "regedit" without quotation marks. Follow through the directories as stated above until you find the video folder for Dungeon Keeper II and be careful only to change the value for EngineID from 2 to 4. Don't touch anything else unless you're sure you know what you're doing.

I still can't get it past the black screen. When I open task manager, it crashes and I can't even click on anything, I have to log off and log back in. I've tried everything