Immediately after the Dolby movie, I get a crash saying 'Execution in WinMain() was stopped by an Access Violation' followed by:

Call stack:
------------------------------------------------------------------
main.exe 0056fa7c()
KERNEL32.DLL 7704fa29()
ntdll.dll 779a76b4()
ntdll.dll 779a7684()
------------------------------------------------------------------

This happened on my old PC, and now the one I upgraded to a few months ago. I've tried every possible fix I've found online, but none of them works. That said, I can't find anyone who seems to have the same issue of the game crashing almost immediately.

Any help much appreciated.

What renderer are you using? Are there any custom command lines?

Usually this problem is fixed by tweaking those. Try alternating between Direct3D, OpenGL and 3DFX Glide (nGlide or similar emulator). Normally, nVidia cards work better with OpenGL and AMD cards with Direct3D (but performance is poor for the latter).

Also be sure D3 (main.exe) is running compatibility mode for XP or 98.

I honestly think I've tried every combination of renderer, compatibility mode and command line that exists. I'm sure I've missed some, but... I still always get the same error message.

Are your sound drivers up to date? Video drivers?

Is it a fresh install? Patched to 1.4?

Yep, yep, yep and... yep :P

Try going into the setup of the launcher and changing the sound to NO SOUND.

Well, I finally figured it out... the game needs to be installed on the same drive as Windows. I think that's it, anyway, it definitely works fine now I moved the installation from E: to C: It's an issue I've had with a few other games of this vintage, just took me ages to remember that's what it was...

Thanks for trying to help, folks!

That's not true. I have mine on my G drive and it works fine.

Welp, all I can say is it's worked in the past, and after trying so many other things it seemed to be the determining factor this time.

Weird, I've had my copy of D3 from like 15 years ago and simply move it from backup drive to my new systems without any issues.

I don't have to have any registry settings. Maybe it's simply running the setup in the launcher and making sure it finds everything correctly?"

D3 is just weird that way. What works on one system fails on another.

This also worked for me. Moved to my C:\ drive, and no more errors. I have no idea why that works. Good catch!

Might be on another drive you have to run it as ADMIN?

Let me explain something about this behavior:

On my case, the same issue occurs, and the solution is exactly what Buffoon1980 says. So, I've searched for the difference between the H:\ hard drive and the C:\ hard drive.

All this issue revolves around the path length and folder counts.
if you see the attachment, you'll notice that the H:\ drive has 3 subfolders with the following path count:
H:\Respaldos ORG\Descents\Descent 3 + Mercenary V = 45 characters with 3 subfolders.

So, I've deleted some characters from the last subfolder and the result is:
H:\Respaldos ORG\Descents\Descent 3 = 31 characters with 3 subfolders.

I've discovered that this game works with a maximum of 49 characters distributed on 3 subfolders.
But I can recommend you store all your old games in short name folders, with 1 or 2 subfolders, to avoid these issues with old games. I think that with even more subfolders, it becomes more difficult for old games to work. And if you add more characters to all subfolders, your old games will have an assured death.

Remember that in Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Windows XP, the folder lengths for programs are too limited (even more so for the Windows 9x era).

Thank you, Buffoon1980, your solution was legendary and made me think about its origin.
See ya!

Now that Descent 3 is open source, you may want to raise that issue at https://github.com/DescentDevelopers/Descent3/issues.

Also, https://github.com/DescentDevelopers/Descent3/actions/workflows/build.yml has some development builds, which you need a Github account in order to access and download.

Note: These are development builds, which means they may have bugs. If you run into any bugs, make sure you open an issue accordingly.