Been working on this since last night just trying to get this game to start. I've gone through ALL the tips, tricks, patches in the forum. Nothing worked in either Steam or GOG versions.

What DID work was 1. doing a fresh install 2. copying over the 1.28 fan patch to the respective game directory. 3. Ran the 1.28 graphic setup 4. ran the 1.28 exe.

Few notes
1. When running the 1.28 exe it shows a launcher before you click play. The launcher has a setting to not show itself before playing. Check that.
2. After I got the fan patch running I renamed its exe to wiz8.exe so I could load the game from Steam or GOG UI.
3. I noticed a few slight difference between Steam and GOG versions. GOG doesn't play the intro video, Steam version did.
4. I have not tested this past playing for 30 minutes but I did load my original savegames from 2001. It just worked.

I'm happy now, should I play it?

Fan Patch 1.28
[url=http://www.postcount.net/forum/showthread.php?243014-Wizardry-8-Fan-Patch-1-28-(22th-anniversary]http://www.postcount.net/forum/showthread.php?243014-Wizardry-8-Fan-Patch-1-28-(22th-anniversary[/url])