I decided to reinstall Rune Gold on my PC but for some reason, it doesn't work at all anymore. It used to work years ago and I had no issues, but for stupid reason this isn't working on my PC despite this being DRM-free. I have tried doing re-installs and adding the unofficial v1.08 patch and the game doesn't run at all unless it's playing on Safe Mode.

Same boat here. Classic has invisible level geometry and Gold just crashes when it starts up and shows 'Precaching' on screen. Two absolutely broken versions...

I think I *may* have found a fix for this game to get this crap working again on Windows 10. After messing around with the game's Safe Mode, I noticed that it would only boot if sound is off, so I took that and figured that it might be the busted sound drivers the game uses by default that is preventing the game from working. I then decided to install this alternate OpenAL audio driver for the game (works for Rune/HOV 1.07/Gold and Rune Classic) and the game is able to play again! There is one problem I remember years back when I was using this driver and I noticed certain voice-over lines gets de-synched with the animations of the cutscene itself unfortunately, and it doesn't seem like the people that made this OpenAL driver seem to care about fixing it.

If anyone wants to try and use this OpenAL driver, you can find it here and see if this fixes the issue. Follow the instructions provided here so the game can default to OpenAL with these drivers instead of the obsolete Galaxy/Generic audio drivers.

OpenAL v2.4.7 for Rune: https://www.oldunreal.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1420981956/23#23
OpenAL dll for Rune Classic (requires the OpenAL v2.4.7 game drivers above): https://www.oldunreal.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1420981956/26#26
INI Instructions that apply to both versions: https://www.oldunreal.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1420981956/0#0