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"setup.exe is not a valid win32 application" What?!?

24K views 4 replies 5 participants last post by  binaryman10011 
#1 ·
I recently attempted to install an old game - Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri - onto my XP machine. It used to work just fine on windows98 but whenever I try to install it on XP I get the following error message: setup.exe is not a valid win32 application.

I checked the game documentation and it clearly says that the game will run on windows XP.

What could be the problem here? I've searched the net and can't figure out what to do.

Incidently, I tried installing the game from a CD image .iso and get the same error message.

Any help is greatly appreciated!
 
#3 ·
cdfreelancer said:
I recently attempted to install an old game - Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri - onto my XP machine. It used to work just fine on windows98 but whenever I try to install it on XP I get the following error message: setup.exe is not a valid win32 application.

I checked the game documentation and it clearly says that the game will run on windows XP.

What could be the problem here? I've searched the net and can't figure out what to do.

Incidently, I tried installing the game from a CD image .iso and get the same error message.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Basically, what this error means is that the version is not correct for your operating system.
Sometimes you can get around this by using XPs compatability mode. You right click the setup.exe file and choose Properties , then on the compatability tab, choose run this program in compatability mode for :
and specify the OS it was originally designed for.
You will probably have to do the same thing for the program itself once it installs.
Basically, the dll (dynamic link libraries) used by XP are newer and more complex than the ones this program and its installer calls for. (Dlls are small standardized programs which are stored in windows and used by programmers to make larger more complicated applications easier to write and run. Instead of writing out a subroutine program which is the same or similar to one that lots of other applications use, the author just says call dll such and so. Now if the dlls you have are the new ones for XP, they are in many cases different than the ones used in win95. But this was taken into account with XP, many will contain a compatability entry which allows them to perform as if they were the older version by skipping certain lines ).
 
#5 ·
this worked for me on a couple of similar games, open my computer, explore the disk with the game, select all the files on the disk, and copy them to your c: drive, then try to open the autorun file in that directory, this sometimes works, and is easier sometimes than trying to figure out how to change other settings, you will still need the disk, the game probably won't work without it, but this may get you past the install.
 
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