an overview of getting windows 10 and petz 5 to play nicely
May 11, 2019 19:56:57 GMT -5
✬MsWildiful✬, Sasha, and 3 more like this
Post by Harpalyce - Digital Nepenthe on May 11, 2019 19:56:57 GMT -5
hello, folks!
this is not a comprehensive guide, but i wanted to include an overview of more or less how i was all able to get it to work.
not all of this is original work by far; there are many solutions found by others. but i'm including them to consolidate it all as one big process so that hopefully it will make it all seem less intimidating - so people can have it all in one flow, instead of chasing across the internet for them.
(this was posted previously, but has been modified to make sure the phbb gods do not look unkindly upon us mortals)
1. actually installing petz
with games in hand, we can start - the acquisition of this abandonware left as an exercise to the reader. click the installer .exe, get hit in the face with a nostalgia sledgehammer, and while the ancient install wizard deals with it for you, if you want to have a little cry on the floor about how ancient you are now and you can feel the youth draining out of you by the minute, i ain't gonna judge.
two things to note:
dogz first, then catz, and just click "why yes i WOULD like to upgrade, install wizard!". people report problems on doing things the other way around. so, may as well have both, and in that order.
second, i have read about the problems people have wrangling this game in vista, etc. - so my advice is just install it somewhere custom where you know exactly where it is. i did this anyway but i didn't actually do it to be clever at the time. i just have a laptop that has a small C drive for windows that is a solid state drive so windows gets to boot at lightning speed, and a much bigger regular hard drive on D. and because my C drive is stuffed full with all of my screenshots of my catgirl in ffxiv (aka very important data), i told petz to go on the D drive. it's chillin' happy there.
now, time to actually boot this puppy! (or kitty.)
2. problem the first: petz wants more elbow room than 1366x768, the absolute madlad
well, okay, this wasn't actually the first problem i encountered. the next step was that i headed off some problems at the pass - by making sure that windows was running it in compatibility mode. doing this is simpler than you'd think. i didn't let windows decide for itself what compatibility settings, because i just wanted to know what was up instead of having my hand held. anyway, find that petz .exe in its folder. right-click on that, properties, then the compatibility tab. i went with the safe choices of "windows xp, service pack 3", go ahead and click "run as administrator", apply, bip bop bam there we go.
then i happily clicked it to run it and... it was very mad and told me to make my resolution bigger.
i run my laptop at 1366x768. which is, admittedly, not its recommended setting! it's actually 1920x1080, but i don't like things being super duper tiny.
so i spent like thirty minutes flummoxed and confused, but then i finally discovered what was up.
...i had, in my display settings, my app size set at 125%.
a reenactment of me realizing this:
so yeah, that'll do it. go to display settings (which you can get to via right-clicking your desktop), and make sure your app scaling is set to 100%, not more than that. whoops.
with that solved, petz 5 was now appeased, and actually booted! the adoption center lay before me, and...
3. problem the second: but i don't want to adopt chase no face
heck yeah! let's get to adopting, and - OH DEAR
fortunately this is a pretty well known problem. it's just petz being overwhelmed by too many pixels. 1366x768 was too much for petz's mind to fathom. 1280x768 makes it much happier, returns faces to cats, and as a boon, since i was running my apps at 125% size anyway, i get to see better! amazing! (well, a little stretched out, but it's fine. i can always switch back when i want to play other things.)
4. a convoluted way around petza for breeding and for just being a little bit contrary
so i considered petza, which i hasten to add is not a bad addon and is not something that people should feel bad about whatsoever. i was just wanting to go for a really vanilla experience and recreation of what i did in 2002, with things like hunger, fatness, etc. all obscured by the game instead of out there in sliders you can manipulate.
unfortunately this day and age, if you set your system clock back, the internet and many applications will go "oh hold up. we don't want any of that. no internet for you! no nothing! GOOD DAY SIR!" and tell you to go just let your computer automatically set your time back to correctness. now you COULD at this point unconnect from the internet. but why on earth would one want to ever do THAT when you could conjure up an overcomplicated solution to a non-problem, sez i.
so, wanting to do the same tricks i did in 2002, but without having it be as simple as just twiddling a slider, because something something uphill both ways in the snow?, i decided to build a rickety card tower of nonsense! hooray!
fortunately, the internet provides!
www.nirsoft.net/utils/run_as_date.html is RunAsDate, a bare-bones, freeware utility that may look intimidating, but is actually easy as pie. don't even have to install it with an install wizard and everything. just download and plonk the .exe into the same petz 5 folder. get the regular flavor (x32), not x64 flavor - it goes by what the program is, not what your computer actually is. (for example, my computer has more than one core - so is not x32. but petz was designed for older computers with only one core, so it needs x32.)
boot up the utility and it will let you tell one app and one app alone that it's another date and time than what your computer thinks. just select the .exe you want it to control - here, Petz 5.exe. i've clicked "move time forward according to real time" as well so the gae doesn't get super confused with minutes moving forward. if prompted, click "Run as Administrator" to give RunAsDate that permission. then just click 'Run' and ta-da, Petz 5 will run thinking it's whatever day you set it to be.
as proof, here's one of my catz, adopted on January 1st just because i figured it was a pleasing start date:
and this of course means you can just use the good ol' clock trick for aging, breeding, and having litters quickly, without dealing with petza's sliders.
and since then, it's worked smooth as silk! no crashes or bugs whatsoever so far.
enjoy your nostalgia, your cute pixel pets, and the joy of creating overly elaborate cattery/kennel names and shownames - from me, Digital Nepenthe Cattery, and DNC's Unseelie Regent "Oberon" and DNC's Ill Met By Moonlight "Titania" too
this is not a comprehensive guide, but i wanted to include an overview of more or less how i was all able to get it to work.
not all of this is original work by far; there are many solutions found by others. but i'm including them to consolidate it all as one big process so that hopefully it will make it all seem less intimidating - so people can have it all in one flow, instead of chasing across the internet for them.
(this was posted previously, but has been modified to make sure the phbb gods do not look unkindly upon us mortals)
1. actually installing petz
with games in hand, we can start - the acquisition of this abandonware left as an exercise to the reader. click the installer .exe, get hit in the face with a nostalgia sledgehammer, and while the ancient install wizard deals with it for you, if you want to have a little cry on the floor about how ancient you are now and you can feel the youth draining out of you by the minute, i ain't gonna judge.
two things to note:
dogz first, then catz, and just click "why yes i WOULD like to upgrade, install wizard!". people report problems on doing things the other way around. so, may as well have both, and in that order.
second, i have read about the problems people have wrangling this game in vista, etc. - so my advice is just install it somewhere custom where you know exactly where it is. i did this anyway but i didn't actually do it to be clever at the time. i just have a laptop that has a small C drive for windows that is a solid state drive so windows gets to boot at lightning speed, and a much bigger regular hard drive on D. and because my C drive is stuffed full with all of my screenshots of my catgirl in ffxiv (aka very important data), i told petz to go on the D drive. it's chillin' happy there.
now, time to actually boot this puppy! (or kitty.)
2. problem the first: petz wants more elbow room than 1366x768, the absolute madlad
well, okay, this wasn't actually the first problem i encountered. the next step was that i headed off some problems at the pass - by making sure that windows was running it in compatibility mode. doing this is simpler than you'd think. i didn't let windows decide for itself what compatibility settings, because i just wanted to know what was up instead of having my hand held. anyway, find that petz .exe in its folder. right-click on that, properties, then the compatibility tab. i went with the safe choices of "windows xp, service pack 3", go ahead and click "run as administrator", apply, bip bop bam there we go.
then i happily clicked it to run it and... it was very mad and told me to make my resolution bigger.
i run my laptop at 1366x768. which is, admittedly, not its recommended setting! it's actually 1920x1080, but i don't like things being super duper tiny.
so i spent like thirty minutes flummoxed and confused, but then i finally discovered what was up.
...i had, in my display settings, my app size set at 125%.
a reenactment of me realizing this:
so yeah, that'll do it. go to display settings (which you can get to via right-clicking your desktop), and make sure your app scaling is set to 100%, not more than that. whoops.
with that solved, petz 5 was now appeased, and actually booted! the adoption center lay before me, and...
3. problem the second: but i don't want to adopt chase no face
heck yeah! let's get to adopting, and - OH DEAR
fortunately this is a pretty well known problem. it's just petz being overwhelmed by too many pixels. 1366x768 was too much for petz's mind to fathom. 1280x768 makes it much happier, returns faces to cats, and as a boon, since i was running my apps at 125% size anyway, i get to see better! amazing! (well, a little stretched out, but it's fine. i can always switch back when i want to play other things.)
4. a convoluted way around petza for breeding and for just being a little bit contrary
so i considered petza, which i hasten to add is not a bad addon and is not something that people should feel bad about whatsoever. i was just wanting to go for a really vanilla experience and recreation of what i did in 2002, with things like hunger, fatness, etc. all obscured by the game instead of out there in sliders you can manipulate.
unfortunately this day and age, if you set your system clock back, the internet and many applications will go "oh hold up. we don't want any of that. no internet for you! no nothing! GOOD DAY SIR!" and tell you to go just let your computer automatically set your time back to correctness. now you COULD at this point unconnect from the internet. but why on earth would one want to ever do THAT when you could conjure up an overcomplicated solution to a non-problem, sez i.
so, wanting to do the same tricks i did in 2002, but without having it be as simple as just twiddling a slider, because something something uphill both ways in the snow?, i decided to build a rickety card tower of nonsense! hooray!
fortunately, the internet provides!
www.nirsoft.net/utils/run_as_date.html is RunAsDate, a bare-bones, freeware utility that may look intimidating, but is actually easy as pie. don't even have to install it with an install wizard and everything. just download and plonk the .exe into the same petz 5 folder. get the regular flavor (x32), not x64 flavor - it goes by what the program is, not what your computer actually is. (for example, my computer has more than one core - so is not x32. but petz was designed for older computers with only one core, so it needs x32.)
boot up the utility and it will let you tell one app and one app alone that it's another date and time than what your computer thinks. just select the .exe you want it to control - here, Petz 5.exe. i've clicked "move time forward according to real time" as well so the gae doesn't get super confused with minutes moving forward. if prompted, click "Run as Administrator" to give RunAsDate that permission. then just click 'Run' and ta-da, Petz 5 will run thinking it's whatever day you set it to be.
as proof, here's one of my catz, adopted on January 1st just because i figured it was a pleasing start date:
and this of course means you can just use the good ol' clock trick for aging, breeding, and having litters quickly, without dealing with petza's sliders.
and since then, it's worked smooth as silk! no crashes or bugs whatsoever so far.
enjoy your nostalgia, your cute pixel pets, and the joy of creating overly elaborate cattery/kennel names and shownames - from me, Digital Nepenthe Cattery, and DNC's Unseelie Regent "Oberon" and DNC's Ill Met By Moonlight "Titania" too