Hey Anachronox fans. Have a dilemma here. I have the original retail package (played it back in the day and enjoyed it greatly) and wanted to explore some of it again. I installed it on both a WinXP machine and Win7Pro (to see what would happen). Then I installed all the patches, in order. In both cases the app crashes at start regardless of compatibility settings and Anachronox settings.

So the dilemma is to buy the GoG version and hope for the best or just not spend time on wrestling with this and be content with the youtube videos. I know several folks have had no issue with the GoG version but not everyone has been so fortunate. My own scorecard with GoG games is rather hit or miss so my pessimist side says it'lll probably be the later and the game won't work no matter all efforts.

I've checked around on this forum and others and haven't come across any remedies for the start up crash (unless I missed it somewhere). The error detail simply states anox.exe crashed at offset: 74786574. Any thoughts on this error or the dilemma here?

Gog games come now with 30 day money back guarantee.
On the other hand you might want to give your game another try with the help of nGlide.

Thanks for the pointer on the money back guarantee. That may just tip my hand. On the OTHER hand I'll give nGlide a whirl and see what mileage I get.

While I'd like to run the GoG version on my Win7Pro laptop (on my lap on the couch, in bed...genearlly when lounging about and MOST CERTAINLY not at a desk), I don't remember enough of the game mechanics to know if that would be feasible. Hence the desire to run on the (at a desk) WinXP machine.

Yep. nGlide does the trick on the WinXP box. Not sure about the eval copy of WickedGL though. Now to estimate the viability of possibly playing this on my laptop in 'lounge mode'. ;)

This might be the famous OpenGL extension limit problem with modern drivers. Do you have a Nvidia graphics card? If so you could use Nvidia Inspector to set the OpenGL extension limit to 4844. When new Nvidia drivers started updating their OpenGL specs it confused some OpenGL games that were programmed a long time ago with a set number of OpenGL extensions and would cause the app to crash on startup. GOG tweaked their copy of Anachronox to avoid this problem.

Cool! I am running with nVidia on both machines. I'll see if I can find that setting.

Just ran nVidia Inspector and changed the openGL extension limit to 4844 per suggestion. Anachronox runs fine this way as well.

My thanks to everyone for the assist.

Should be possible in theory, but you'll need a mouse to control the game. If you're able to use one while lounging, then you'll be all set.