Giveaway of the Day Forums

1. 

   Dragonlair
   

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   Member

   I have discovered something very very strange. Some of the Alawar games I got from Game Giveaway of the Day (but not all) revert to demo mode if you select "Run as Administrator" to run the game in Vista.

   I am running Vista32 Ultimate SP2 if that makes any difference.

   I discovered it after Avira fixed the false positive for arxon.wrp. I noticed my selection to use Windowed mode rather than Full Screen was being ignored. That's usually a sign that it can't write to the records properly and Admin mode usually solves the problem.

   I was SHOCKED to see the "you have 60 minutes to play)" message instead of the game starting directly.

   I checked Gamebox to see if that may be why it says some are demo but aren't and it's not consistent. Bloxxit and Arctic Quest do not have this flaw but Cubozoid does. None of these three show as full versions in Gamebox. I have not checked ALL the Alawar Games I have.

   I'll see if I can find the config file for Arxon and fix the problem that way.

   Can anybody from GOTD explain what is wrong???

   Posted 4 months ago #
2. 

   BuBBy
   

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   Administrator

   Most likely it is to do with where the registration settings are stored - when you originally ran activate.exe - you did so from your user account. This means your regular user account was registered to play the game.

   When you run as Administrator - you replace the "current user" registry settings belonging to your account with the "current user" registry settings of the Administrator.

   The solution could be - when you first ran Activate.exe - do so both from your user account, and then run Activate as an Administrator.

   Same if there were 3 accounts on a PC for the 3 kids in the family - you may (depending on the game) need to run activate from all 3 of the user accounts - so that each child can play the full game when logged in with their usual windows account.

   Posted 4 months ago #
3. 

   Dragonlair
   

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   Member

   Thanks, BuBBy.

   That explanation actually makes sense. I never thought of that because I only have one ID and it does have admin authority - I just don't use it all the time.

   I did notice that there were two different messages seen if I tried admin mode. Some were from the "unknown" direction (yellow band) and the other was more known but still asking for OK.

   It still doesn't answer my question about Gamebox but it does make sense!

   I never did find the stats/config file for Arxon. I knows who I am and where I am in the game but not this one option! It even remembers my setting to turn off the music.

   Posted 4 months ago #
4. 

   GMMan
   

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   Member

   If you need to copy the key to a global location, try HKCU\Software\Alawar\<gameid>
   Copy it into your HKLM\Software\Alawar\...

   Posted 4 months ago #
5. 

   Dragonlair
   

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   Member

   That doesn't help much. This game also has folders in the registry under BrainStorm. All the different places I found Arxon or Brainstorm, I never did find any reference to "Full Screen". Since it does save all the other settings, I've decided that it does not save that custom setting.

   As for the reversion to trial mode if I try to use admin mode, I'll just avoid that. There's no reason to use it. I only have a few games that require it and all are older games. Even if you avoid Program Files (which I do whenever I possible can figure a way around it), some games will not write stats and custom settings unless in admin mode. That's the ONLY reason to use Admin mode. Out of 400 games, I think it's needed about 4 times.

   I thank everybody for their help and BuBBy's suggestion tells me something to do on subsequent games but it's not something I need to worry about right now as I can't do much about it for the older games and it's not worth the possible damage to the Registry to play with it.

   Posted 4 months ago #

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