Hi folks, I don't know how many people this'll be of interest to, but I've got a couple of laptops and I've been running the latest preview of Win 10 on one of them. This past week I've played through all the campaigns of HoMM3 on Win 10 Preview.

For the record I'm running the 32-bit version of Win 10 Preview, and it's running quite smoothly. Frankly, I'd expected some crashes, but to my surprise there weren't any.

A couple o' questions:

Is Internet Explorer preinstalled with the latest version of Windows?

Is th operating system actually called 'Windows 10'?

The IE thing is difficult to answer as I'm working with the Preview version of Win 10. My guess is that at launch we'll see Microsoft Edge (the brand new replacement for IE). Edge btw works REALLY nicely.

The OS is actually called Windows 10 yes.

Thanks for your reply.

:)

So I encountered the problem with Heroes 3 CD (GOG version) on release version of Windows 10. Bug report with details is on tracker.

Option 1: Reinstall.
Option 2: Install the Heroes III HD mod. One of its options is enabling no-CD mode which you can use. https://sites.google.com/site/heroes3hd/eng/download

1: Already tried few times, check the report. Game is working when installed on C:, but my tablet has very little of free space on C: and I want to have game directory on D:.
2: Thanks but that's not the solution. I acknowledges this mod but I'm rarely using it. Game should be playable without any tricks, after all.

In this day and age, there aren't many games that old that you can play without tricks for a myriad of reasons. Community solutions are your only shot for so many titles. Besides, you can only benefit from the HD mod and many people use it.

Well, I noticed that you want to help me which I sincerely appreciate, but personally I don't want to do any tricks (including installing something else than game) here just to get game working, even if I used to do these things some time ago (like first days after Heroes 3 release, when I was unable to run the game on my then old PC to the point I was considering oracle's visiting) or in case of attempting run the game in non-supported environment (like running Heroes 3 on Android via VCMI/QEMU/ExaGear).

You see, it's a commercial game that was re-released on GOG with supportive work from GOG's staff, my device meet game's requirements, I paid my money and as a typical customer, sure, I would like to have this situation treated like bug that should be fixed properly and by first party, not avoided by instructions and tools from community. Things aren't desperately bad but I hope to get it fixed eventually because of presumedly device-common situation mentioned in report. I replied here just to notify GOG staff/community (including potential players) about that issue and with humble intention to keep my report on tracker from being closed unresolved. Hope you don't hold me as prudish prig now, cheers :D.

I posted a reply on the tracker with a suggestion for a workaround, but I'm not sure it will work...

You made some interesting surmise here, about file system in particular. Thanks, I'll try that later.

I would advise against jumping straight to a new OS so early in its release cycle, especially Windows - you'll come up against all of the usual early adopter problems, incompatibility being one. As the GOG disclaimer reads: "Please be advised that Windows 10 operating system will receive frequent hardware driver and software updates following its release; this may affect game compatibility " In other words they don't guarantee games will work perfectly at this stage.

Hope you're figuring it out! same problemo

I uninstalled the game, turned off my tablet and put a new SD card - 64 GB Ultra speed, genuine one from Sandisk. Then I formatted SD as NTFS with default cluster size in Windows 10 (it was NTFS already, but I've decided to give it a quick formation because previously this card was installed in nVidia Shield), installed HoMM3 again, on D:, updated the game with the GOG patch. Alas, problem still here.

I agree with your point, but being a notable digital distributor, surely GOG can't deviate from supporting the latest version of Microsoft OS for a long time. They'll have to embrace it, and better sooner than later :D. In this case, one should consider me as Windows 10 GOG tester. So far I've tried ~30 games from my modest GOG library on Windows 10, and noticed only 2 problematic games (HoMM3 and Settlers 3, single.exe of latter runs strictly in background) out of those thirty. Furthermore, I've noticed strange behaviour of Galaxy client on my tablet which I would like to report later.

I suppose you didn't try to create a directory junction :

mklink /j "C:\Program Files (x86)\Heroes of Might and Magic 3 Complete" "D:\Program Files (x86)\Heroes of Might and Magic 3 Complete"

That was my first suggested workaround eventually... Replace the installation path by whatever it is on your system.

Also, in case you don't run it as an admin (I personnally NEVER run games with administrative privileges), considering it's an old game, Windows' UAC virtualisation is triggered to permit the game to run despite security restrictions that didn't exist at the time of Windows 98. To make things as short as possible, that means some read-only places on the system have per-user "virtual" counterparts, such as the Program Files folder or the HKLM registry hive, that are either stored in %LOCALAPPDATA%\VirtualStore concerning Program Files, or HKCU\Software\Classes\VirtualStore concerning the registry.

You may want to check here in particular :
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\VirtualStore\MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\New World Computing\Heroes of Might and Magic® III\1.0

Or here if you own a 32 bit edition of Windows 10 (hence without the Windows-on-Windows subkey) :
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\VirtualStore\MACHINE\SOFTWARE\New World Computing\Heroes of Might and Magic® III\1.0

Most notably, there's an AppPath value, mine is set to :
D:\Program Files (x86)\Heroes of Might and Magic 3 Complete\

since I have it on D: too. But maybe yours is set to another value for some reason.