Ecco PC Visual Install Guide

Ecco PC is a game written for Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. Without additional tools, unfortunately the game cannot be installed on modern machines. Luckiely for us, Sebastian has hacked into the game, and written a little tool to install and get Ecco PC ready on pretty much every Windows version to date.
As many people have been having trouble installing and running Ecco PC on computers running Windows XP or higher, we've decided to create give a little guided tour about it. In fact there are a lot of difficult passages and trapdoors on your way until you can fully enjoy the game. But is even possible to run it on my Windows 7 64-bit machine I'm currently using. Here's how!

Step 1: Download

First you need to download the game and install files. Create a new folder on your hard drive called something like "Ecco PC Install". The download the following files into that folder:

  • The game files: Download "ecco_pc_rip.rar" (6.66MB)
  • Sebastians "Ecco PC Wizard" (our 3rd party install tool): Download "EccoPCWizard.exe" (0.3MB)

    • Step 2: Installing and Patching the Game

    Now, to install the game, run the "EccoPCWizard.exe":

    Choose your language.



    Select "Install a ripped version of Ecco PC from a RAR archive".



    You'll need to locate the game file archive here. Click "Open file..." and browse to your "Ecco PC Install" folder, and double click "ecco_pc_rip.rar".



    Specify the Target folder. You can choose any location on your hard drive(s). If the folder doesn't exist, the installer will create it for you. We'll choose the one the wizard suggests. Clicking "Next" will initiate the installation.



    You may let the wizard create some shortcuts for your desktop and start menu.


    Don't close the wizard when you see this apparently final page!

    Instead, please click the button "Back" as we still need the wizard to configure the game! (If you have accidently closed the wizard, no problem, reopen it, click "Next" and you'll end up at the same location.)



    You'll return to the page with the install methods. Choose "Patch the Ecco PC program" and proceed.



    The wizard should automatically choose the right location of the freshly installed Ecco PC executable. Check if that's right and proceed.



    Welcome to the patch dialog! With this you'll alter the Ecco PC executable to make it playable on modern machines. The options set in the screenshot above should work for most people, so you might want to just use these and proceed. If you want to know what each of them does, here's a list of the functions:

  • You'll always need to check "Run in Windows 95 compatibility mode"
  • If you want to have the option to play the game in a Window, check "Run in 256 colors". Be aware though, Windows will look quite messed up when the game is running. Multitasking will be available with this option, but it will be very ugly! Only check this if you absolutely do not want to play fullscreen!!
  • "Run in 640 x 480 screen resolution": does what it says, useful in combination with windowed mode, else no need to check this option.
  • "Fix 'Save Game' and 'Restore Game' Dialogs": This is needed to fix the savegame function of the game, always check this! You can also change the amount of save game slots. There are 33 levels, this might be a good number!
  • "Skip the startup movie": Very useful! Skips the pretty long Novotrade company logo animation when the game starts (yawn...)
  • "Enable cancelling of the startup movie": if you prefer to have the option to watch it (yawn...!) or skip it yourself by pressing a key!
  • "Ignore missing Ecco PC CD": The game won't check if the original CD is inserted (always check this!)
  • "Display Ecco's coordinates and the number of frames per second": This is for the geeks and nerds who know what that means, and those who want to find out and become one of them!

    • After you've made all your choices you may proceed and close the "Ecco PC Wizard":

    Step 3: (optional) Set up the Soundtrack

    This step is fully optional, and requires downloading a large file, setting up a virtual CD drive and fiddling with some windows system settings. If you just want to test the game for now, continue with step 4 and return to this step anytime.
    As the game cannot seem play the soundtrack properly from the original game disc anymore, we'll have to set up a virtual CD drive using some software. We've found out, that Ecco PC runs perfectly fine and plays all the ingame music using this method.

  • First, download the CD image of the original game to your "Ecco PC Install" folder: Download "eccopc_eu_image.rar" (408MB / Password: cavernsofhope)
  • Extract the file with some unzipping software. We recommend 7-Zip which is free and easy to use! When you are asked for a password, enter: "cavernsofhope". You will get three files called "ECCO_L4A.ccd", "ECCO_L4A.img" and "ECCO_L4A.sub".
  • The virtual CD software we use is called "Virtual CloneDrive". It's free and easy to use! Download "Virtual CloneDrive" (~2MB) and install it.
  • Right click "ECCO_L4A.ccd" and choose "Mount ....." from the menu. Your new virtual CD drive should now contain the original Ecco PC disc! :)
  • Ecco PC can only play music from the first CD drive. As your PC probably has more than one optical drive, you will need to switch drive letters so that the virtual CD drive is in the first place. To do that, enter the Start Menu, Control Panel, Administrative Tools (might be within System), Computer Management, Disk Management. All your optical drives including the virtual one should appear in the list, being named "CD 0", "CD 1", "CD 2" etc. Find the virtual CD drive (having "ECCO_L4A" monted) and switch it with the first optical drive on the list. Switch optical drive letters by right clicking and choosing "Change drive-letter assignment".
  • You are now ready to play the game with the soundtrack available! You may also test the soundtrack with your personal media player!
  • If you don't play the game anymore you may want to remove the virtual CD drive and switch the order of your optical drives back to as they were before!

    • Step 4: Prepare and play the game

    Now before the actual fun may begin, you'll need to know a couple more things about the game program itself. First, start the game by clicking your desktop or start menu icon.




    This is what your game should look like when you run it.


    Ecco PC originally comes with two graphics modes: "Normal", and "High detail". On modern machines Normal graphics mode appears to be broken, trying to play it results in the game freezing. So the first thing you need to do is activate "High detail" mode from the "Mode" menu, so that it is checked!



    There are other options you might want to change:

  • "Game: Challenge" lets you set the difficulty of the game. This has mainly influence on the amount of enemies that appear.
  • "Mode: Window" is only available if you play with 256 colors - like I said before, most of you want to avoid this, as Windows will look like a mess with constantly swapping color palettes. It is useful if you want to switch windows (e.g. for chatting) during play, though.
  • "Options: Music" should always be unchecked, as the music play function doesn't work anymore on today's machines.
  • "Options: Language" let's you choose between English, German, French and Spanish languages.
  • "Options: Setup Keyboard" and "Joystick" let you configure the game input of your choice.

    • The time has come, you are finally allowed to play the game! Choose "Game: Go" or press "F2" on your keyboard to run the game!


    Enjoy your game! :-)

    You can always get back to the menu screen by pressing "Esc" on your keyboard. While in the menu screen you can save your game from "Game: Save..." or by pressing "F4" on your keyboard. Selecting "Game: Continue" or pressing "F3" on your keyboard will continue your session!

    Troubleshooting


    If no disc is in your optical drive, the game will always prompt you this error message. You can simply fix this by clicking "Cancel" (Screenshot says "Abbrechen", ladies and gentlemen, time to learn some German!) and the game will enter play mode anyways! The error message will always prompt if no CD is inserted. You can set up the soundtrack to play using Step 3 from this guide!

    "Some glyphs show no reaction when I sing at them!"
    Ecco PC has a couple of glyphs which will play videos. Unfortunately on today's machines these glyphs only cause trouble as in disabling sound after the video played, or crashing the game. That's why we disabled the video glyphs for now, as we cannot find a solution for this problem. If you still want to try to play these videos, you will have to download the videos from the site or copy them from the disc (virtual disc works fine too) into the DATA directory of your Install folder (e.g. "C:\GAMES\ECCO PC\DATA")

    Cheats

    There are no actual cheats for this game, but if you want to be able to select all the stages from the loading screen, you might want to check out our Ecco PC Savegame Tool!

    Thanks for reading our guide!

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