Googolplex wrote:

Hi, is someone here who can tell me how to get this game working on Windows 10? I already tried all patches, many compatibility […]
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Hi,
is someone here who can tell me how to get this game working on Windows 10? I already tried all patches, many compatibility modes and fixes, dgVoodoo2, single core fix, but nothing wants to work! I get in the main menu, but the background picture is grey. I can't believe that's correct. And when I click on "New Game" and select one of the difficulty options, nothing happens. No game is loading.

This is very strange, because the game starts and lead me into the main menu.

Thanks for your help!

Retail or Steam version? At least in retail version DRM might be giving you trouble, safedisc no longer works on Windows 10. Cracked no-cd .exe might help.

If it's Steam version then I don't know, I guess you lose nothing by trying the same no-cd.

No problem here (1.0 retail with nocd).

I would guess either a bad install or bad GPU driver.

I have the retail CD and already a no-cd exe (otherwise I wouldn't get into the main menu), so Safedisc is not the problem.

Hmm, maybe I have to test version 1.0, but why should the patches break the game?

Googolplex wrote:

I have the retail CD and already a no-cd exe (otherwise I wouldn't get into the main menu), so Safedisc is not the problem.

Hmm, maybe I have to test version 1.0, but why should the patches break the game?

It's more likely it's the crack that breaks the game, maybe the one you are using just doesn't work right. Try another one if you can.

Trying 1.0 is not a bad idea, I imagine launch versions got cracked more often by those larger groups on avarage than later versions which might get only cracked by someone else who might not be that talented. I've always used no-cd cracks on my games and I've run into bad cracks plenty of times.

Patch 1.5 uses the same exe from Patch 1.3, so the crack for 1.5 shows just version 1.3, but that's correct. The latest patches don't make changes to the exe.
I used the crack from gamecopyworld which is from a professional group: Myth/DEViANCE

Now I tried version 1.0 with two different cracks and it's the same problem.
My game is the german version and the crack is for the english version. The menu texts are still in german, but maybe there are different exes for different languages and that's why the game stopped working.

After the setup the folder with the game files is 1,04 GB. I skipped the setup of DirectX 9.0b, because I already have applied the 9.0c redistributable package from MIcrosoft on my Win10.

The game uses the Quake 3 engine, which I expect to be compatible.

Tried different graphics drivers?

No, I have the latest nVidia driver. I don't think that's the issue. The latest driver should be the most compatible for old games aswell.

ZellSF can you please make a screenshot of your main menu? Then I can see whether there's something wrong with my setup.

While not OP's issue, I think it's worth mentioning that Call of Duty 1 / UO and other games based on Quake 3's engine that haven't been updated have the famous crash bug that happens at startup when the game tries to output GL_EXTENSIONS string in the console. The string may not fit into game's buffer and no bounds checking is done, so it may crash; you get buffer overrun error.

It can happen on newer graphics cards where the GL_EXTENSIONS string is longer than on older cards (since they have more OpenGL features). Some drivers do handle Call of Duty 1 (and some other games) specially and truncate GL_EXTENSIONS string. Such is the case with NVIDIA's drivers where a special setting is exposed to truncate the string which can be seen with NVIDIA Profile Inspector.

The easiest workaround, should the buffer overrun error pop-up, is opening the .exe with some hex editor and locating the following string:

GL_EXTENSIONS: %s

Change it to:

GL_EXTENSIONS: %p

Googolplex wrote:

many compatibility modes and fixes

Compatibility modes make the most difference when the game relies on some specific quirks of the APIs it calls. CoD isn't special in that regard.

Although with fancier monitors/display resolutions, one may need to disable display scaling at high DPI settings (on Windows 10: Change high DPI settings button on Compatibility tab, set "Override high DPI scaling behavior..." to "Application").

Googolplex wrote:

dgVoodoo2

It's an OpenGL game, so dgVoodoo cannot effect it much. DirectDraw is only used to get amount of video memory to determine default graphics settings preset.

Googolplex wrote:

Hmm, maybe I have to test version 1.0, but why should the patches break the game?

They shouldn't. In some games, some feature gets broken with some patch, but I'm not aware of anything bad in this case.

Googolplex wrote:

The latest patches don't make changes to the exe.

They update the multiplayer parts, including the multiplayer .exe. Multiplayer .exe does not have a CD check anyway, so it can be tried to rule out bad noCD patch (which probably isn't an issue here).

Googolplex wrote:

My game is the german version and the crack is for the english version. The menu texts are still in german, but maybe there are different exes for different languages and that's why the game stopped working.

There should be one .exe for all versions.

Can you open the properties of the shortcut you use to launch CoD with the right click, go to Shortcut tab and modify Target field to make it look like this:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Call of Duty\CoDSP.exe" +set developer 1 +set logfile 1

Obviously don't change the path if you have the game installed elsewhere, just add those parameters after CoDSP.exe as written. Start the game and quit it. Log file console.log will appear in Call of Duty\main folder. Post its content here so we can see if there are any clues there. Before you just copy-paste it, you might want to delete/change the line containing your Windows account user name if it's something you don't want to be seen publicly.

Thanks for your help. Actually I found the issue. I created an image file with Alcohol 120% and used this for the setup. I selected the correct profile for SafeDisc 2/3/4, but for a very strange reason (maybe no emulation on Win10) some files were not installed. The setup folder was 1,04 GB (1,07 GB patched). But now I installed directly from the disks and what did I see? 1,12 GB (1,15 GB patched)! And now there's a background picture in the main menu and everything works!!!

So it was messed up install. Glad you got it working now! I didn't comment on the folder size as I wasn't sure how big it's supposed to be. I also have United Offensive expansion installed so it's little over 2 GB in size.

I also have United Offensive and my folder is 2,06 GB (patched to v1.51 and uncut patch).