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Spoarph's avatar
10 years ago

Command and Conquer Generals Zero Hour not working

I bought the Command and Conquer Generals Deluxe Edition pack, which worked for a while on my laptop. However, after recent updates to Windows, the game wouldn't start and gave me a message telling me to restart with administrator privileges and try again. I found out that this was a security problem with a disc reading program and fixed that problem. When I tried to run the game after that, however, the game would appear to start, then would flash rapidly on the screen before crashing and giving me a message along the lines of "A serious error has occurred. This could be due to overheating, etc.." After changing the compatibility settings to Windows XP Pack 3, the game managed to get past the intro, but after the bar finished loading the game would crash with the same message. For whatever reason, the World Builder program that came with the game still works. If anyone knows how to fix this issue help would be appreciated.

Also, this isn't for the Ultimate Collection, but I didn't see either of the individual games as options.

4 Replies

  • @Spoarph

    Ah, the Safedisc issue. How exactly did you fix it? Through the registry fix or with a no-cd exe? Also, what's your operating system?

  • It could have been the registry fix. I opened a command prompt and entered some commands to auto disable the disc security thing. This current issue showed up after I did, though I don't think it was a result of that fix. I'm using a laptop with a 64 bit operating system.

  • Nyerguds's avatar
    Nyerguds
    Hero+
    10 years ago

    @Spoarph

    Actually, the registry fix re-enables the safedisc security thing. The original error occurs when the game is unable to load its DRM system, so re-enabling it fixes that. I was mostly just wondering if you used a cracked exe. Not that I'd mind that, though; in this case it is, oddly, a perfectly valid solution 😞. But it's hard to give support for that since we can never really know how it changed the game, and sometimes these no-cd exes require you to copy certain files from the game disks to work properly.

    As for your issue, some more information would probably be useful. What operating system are you running on? Where is your game installed?

    I know that in a lot of cases, the problem is that you install programs as administrator, under "program files", but because of that you don't have the correct rights to actually run the program later. Generals is a bit of a fringe case in that aspect; the first generation of games that uses Program Files as default install location, but I don't think that back in these days, that install folder was already read only even to these installed programs. As you might imagine, this is disastrous for earlier games which store their settings inside the install folder; they can't change their own settings file.

    I don't think this applies to Generals too, though; it makes folders in My Documents to store its settings. But you should make sure these folders are indeed there, and the files inside it are writable for your standard account. Otherwise, you should create them / take ownership of the folder. I think the pinned Common Problems thread in the forum might have more info on that.

  • Hi, sorry for the late response. The major game files are indeed in My Documents and I do seem to have access to all of them. 

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