I'm looking at purchasing this but it seems you have to jump through a few hoops in order to get it working. Is there an installation guide or can somebody tell me exactly what I need to do to get it working.

I'm running Windows 7 64bit, which seems to be the standard OS today. I installed the game without any problems whatsoever. You only have to jump through hoops if you want to install and use DromED for Thief 2 – it's very finicky and I still haven't found a solution to its persistent crashes. I do recommend installing TafferPatcher, if it's not included in the installation files already. I didn't have any performance problems or graphical artifacts with it.

To my knowledge, most of the issues are with Thief Gold rather than Thief 2. And, the only real issue is that the cutscenes don't play, but that is apparently fixed easily by installing ddfix (listed in the sticky thread in this forum). I do not know if Thief 2 also requires a fix for the videos, anyone else know? If Thief 2 does require any fixes I'm sure they are included with Tafferpatcher, which Charon121 mentioned.

So, the game should run without you having to do anything, except perhaps fixing the videos. But it will run at the original, low resolution. If you want some optional modernizing features like high-res widescreen resolution and other graphical upgrades, there are many fan patches that provide this, and these are discussed in the sticky thread also. However, these are NOT required.

So I think most of the hoops are actually optional, but be aware that you might need to fix the videos. Also, just in general, old games sometimes have a few niggles with Windows 7, so you might need to mess with the install location and administrator priveleges to get it to install and run correctly. But that's not unique to the Thief games, it happens with a lot of old games.

NOTE: I haven't tried running these games myself yet, so other posters should correct me if I said anything that isn't true.

Thanks for the help. So do I just install the tafferpatcher after the game as normal? Is there anything about the tafferpatcher that I should know about that could cause problems? Thanks

Both Thief Gold and Thief 2 have DDFix built into their release already now, so they should work straight "out-of-the-box". Mine certainly did in both XP x64 with GeForce 9800GT, and XP x32 with Intel GMA950 graphics.