Problem with a game

[Mobius]

Hi, probably wrong place to ask but I know alot of you play games, and Championship Manager.
Basically I compressed my CM folder using Winrar, now I want to play it but when I double click the cm icon etc in the zip the game doesn't come on, although CM appears on my task manager and uses my computers resources. I also extracted the entire zip and tried, and the same thing happens. How can I get to play the game? It must be running as its on my task manager hogging lots of memory.

Any help much appreciated!

 

[MYstIC G]

Re install the game from the original CD then try unzipping your archive over it. It's most likely some key dll files that aren't in the games folder are no longer on your machine.

 

[Munkey]

or registry files are a bit screwed.

 

[SilverHood]

CLICKY!

 

[Munkey]

heh. very subtle silverhood

 

[Tom]

Maybe you didn't archive the directory paths?

 

[babs]

There's a registry key HKEY_USERS\blah_blah_blah\Software\Sports Interactive Ltd\Installs\Championship Manager 4 (or something similar) which points to your install directory and probably counts it as a workign directory too. If you unzip it somewhere else it's looking in the wrong place.

 

[Ch3tan]

Champ manager has eaten all my time for the last 3 (or is it 4?) weeks. Its so damned addictive.

 

[Shovel]

Running the EXE from inside the ZIP wont work because although it looks like a folder, the file you run (and only that file) actually gets extracted transparently to somewhere like C:\Temp. It's like running the game without any of the other files.

For it to work you need to have all the files - in their proper dir/subdir structure in a folder on your hard disk, more recent versions will have registry keys attached that lock it down to a specific folder after you've installed it too.

If you really want to run it compressed you need to be running the NTFS file system (Windows 2000/Windows XP). Right click the Championship Manager folder and click "Properties". On the 'General' tab, under 'Attributes' click 'Advanced' and then choose the compression check box. It'll ask if you want to apply this to subfolders and files as well, say yes.

This will compress the folder down fairly well, and it's a useful feature that I use for backup folders and rarely used documents folders but the idea of using this for a game scares me. It will have a big performance hit on the game, since all the files will be compressed/decompressed constantly as you run the game. Given Champ Man's appetite for system resources as it is, that strikes me as a very, very bad idea.

However, you can always uncheck the compression checkbox again if you don't like it

Hope that sorts you out.

 

[caLLous]

I also extracted the entire zip and tried

Shovel --^

Meg speaks the truth. All you need is a reinstall and then copy over the user files (no need to extract all of the files if the saves are easily identifiable). Unless you want to start from scratch, then just reinstall the game and play on.

 

[Mobius]

Hmm, unzipped its only 350mb. That doesn't sound like a full game does it? I'll have to borrow it from my friend and reinstall it I think. Thanks for the help.