Interesting. I'm assuming the main thing keeping this game off GOG is similar to the Gold Box games, Ubisoft owning the game rights but Wizards holding onto the D&D license. (In this case, Activision and Dream Pod 9)

Now, I don't know if this is the right thread to put this in, so forgive me if I blundered, I'll be willing to move the post, but a friend of mine and I just bought four copies of the game, because we thought giant robot warfare simulation would be awesome, and rightfully so. After awhile, though, we hit a problem. The EARMusf application starts the first time Heavy Gear does crashes, takes the game down with it, and does so constantly. I don't recall the application needing to run after the first launch, so a bypass may be sufficient. However, as this problem happened consistently on multiple machines, all various versions of Windows 7, I'm pretty sure that it's a problem with the app, or we've been consistently installing it wrong. The application seems to be an audio one. Is there anyone who knows what we're doing wrong, or if there's a workaround? I've tried the app compat toolkit, tried virtual machines, nothing's working. And we really want eight-way giant robot warfare.

As has been stated before, the fix for the culling issue at the top of this thread works, but the game will always crash in Config Controls and Instant Action. The controls can be manually edited in bindings.def, although this is a pain to do if your OS isn't English since you'll have to guess what the names of the individual controls should be in your particular language.

Missions will sometimes randomly crash upon completion, but if this happens it's a fairly simple matter to restart the mission and then cheat to instantly complete it (by typing 'set mission' into the console).

This works until mission 10, which will ALWAYS crash upon completion no matter what you do. As far as I can tell, there's no way to progress beyond this point in the campaign if you're playing on Windows 7. The Training and Historical mission all worked fine, but it's a pain not being able to finish the game after all the effort I put into actually getting it running.

As much as it pains me, I doubt we'll ever see Heavy Gear II on GOG. The GOG engineering team would have to work some crazy magic to get this game to run reliably on modern systems, even if all the legal hurdles were cleared with Activision and Dream Pod 9. I just can't see it happening, but hopefully I'll be proven wrong.

Holding down ESC while Instant Action loads seems to prevent it from crashing, at least it did for me last time I had HG2 installed (had to do a HDD format when I got new hardware recently)

Reinstalling HG2 now...

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EDIT: Got it installed and running. See below.

Stuff that may be helpful to know, for those trying to get the game working:

• 'iasinst.exe' in the Setup folder on the HG2 CD needs to be run in Windows 98 compatibility mode to avoid EAR / audio errors (it might be a good idea to set everything on the CD to run in Windows 98 compatibility mode and as an Administrator before you install)

• Fixed 'shell.dll' still needed to avoid crash on launch (for me at least).

• Using Windows 95 / 98 compatibility modes on 'Heavy Gear 2.exe' causes the game to crash on launch. EDIT: ...on some computers - others it might not be an issue, but it might not be needed either.

• Using Windows XP compatibility modes on 'Heavy Gear 2.exe' causes the game to fail to start with a "DirectX 6 not detected" message.

• K-Lite Codec Pack seems to break the intro video and the main menu - the audio from the movie works, but the game gets stuck on a black screen. It also locks the mouse cursor in the middle of the screen (you have to terminate the 'Heavy Gear 2.exe' process through Task Manager, using the keyboard, to escape). I ended up uninstalling it, which got the intro video playing normally and the main menu displaying correctly.

• Holding ESC while Instant Action is loading (until you're in the IA level with the in-game menu open) prevents it from crashing (most of the time), not doing so seems to guarantee a crash.

• Culling fix in the first post still works :)

• Config Controls crashes for me too :(

I can confirm that holding ESCAPE during the Instant Action loading screen keeps the game from crashing (at least when I tested).

Can you make it past Mission 10 in the campaign, if you cheat your way through all the missions?

...ive got the cd's "on the attic", but still waiting for gog release to actually finish this one. Got stuck midgame back then.

Dang, one of those games I should remember to play on one of my XP-powered retro-PCs, as long as I still have them around. I earlier installed and tried out Heavy Gear 2 retail on my old desktop single-core AMD CPU PC with ATI Radeon X800 Pro graphics card and Windows XP (from around early 2000s I think), and it least on that HG2 seemed to run fine without any special workarounds, I think. I didn't even have the culling problems, so apparently Radeon X800 is old enough for the game, even though it can run games like Far Cry, Half-life 2 and even Doom 3 pretty good.

With the first Heavy Gear though, I had to run it on a Windows 98SE PC (IBM ThinkPad T41 laptop) to run it successfully. I couldn't run it fine even on Windows XP, at least when using the latest patch level. For some reason the unpatched HG ran though, with its bugs and inferior graphics (the patch improved the graphics, among other things).

Still wishing to see fully working virtualized Windows XP and Windows 98SE environments for VMWare Player or whatever...

Just tried using the "set mission" cheat to skip through each mission (from 1 all the way to the final cutscene), it worked without crashing.

Whether or not the campaign can be played through normally without the level skip cheat, I have yet to test...

That's strange - for me, the game will always crash upon completion of mission 10. You mentioned that Windows 95 / 98 and Windows XP compatibility modes don't work for you. Does that mean that you're running the game without any compatibility at all?

The Windows 95 and 98 compatibility modes are the only ways I've been able to get past the "DirectX 6 not detected" prompt.

I tried out the Windows 95 / 98 compatibility modes again and they no longer seem to make it crash on launch - they used to last time I had the game installed (which is why I didn't try them earlier with this install), not sure what's changed this time. The game doesn't need them to work, though.
XP compatibility still causes the "DirectX 6 not detected" message.

The 'Heavy Gear 2.exe' is set to 'Run as Administrator' and use the 'DirectXTrimTextureFormats' fix described in the first post of the thread - aside from those, I have no compatibility settings applied to it.

I didn't apply any compatibility settings to the game setup files before installation.

During installation I allowed the game to install DirectX 6 and 'DirectX Media' (think that's what it was called).
If you didn't install DirectX 6 during installation you can run 'DXSETUP.EXE' in the 'DIRECTX' folder on the CD to install it (if a window opens containing a button 'ReInstall DirectX', click it). (This won't break your existing DirectX 9/10/11 installation, at least on Windows XP and 7)
I can't find a way to install 'DirectX Media' after installation - you might need to run the game setup again to get it.

The only program on the CD that needed any kind of compatibility mode applied to work was 'iasinst.exe', which I set to run in 'Windows 98 / Windows Me' compatibility mode and 'Run as Administrator'.

I have no idea what's changed (I haven't done anything to the game or settings related to it as far as I know), but today I no longer seem to need to hold ESC for IA to work, and I got into the Control Options menu without the game crashing.

All that I've done since I last ran the game (with crashes on IA and Control Options), that I can remember, roughly in order:

• Shut down PC overnight

• Installed a cursor-editing program called AniFX

• Played some amount of: Jedi Knight - Dark Forces 2, PlanetSide 2, World of Tanks, Planetary Annihilation Beta, Grim Dawn Alpha

• Installed and played Endless Space through Steam (which ran DirectX {June 2010, I think} and Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 x86 redistributables)

(sorry for double-posting)

I tried all the stuff in the OP, and I have this problem where the main menu is a black screen. Tried uninstalling the K-Lite pack but it still happens. I can hear the cursor sounds and alt-tabbing shows the menu but the cursor barely moves. Does anyone know how to fix this?