Recently I bought The Movies (PC) for a measely $2 at a thrift shop in Georgia as I’m majoring in film production and figured ‘Hey, why not?’. Unfortunately when I came home and opened the smashed, taped-up case, I discovered the first disc had a decent amount of scratches on it. First time I popped it in, didn’t work. Cleaned it. Second time it ran but froze. Third time it installed but didn’t run properly. To save others the frustration of dealing with this, here is what worked for me:
Clean your discs otherwise it might freeze when trying to install a file.
When you first pop in CD 1, the autorun.exe will pop up. Do NOT click it. Instead, click ‘Open Folder to view Files’. There should be a file called setup.exe. Right click that and select ‘Run as Administrator’
It’s important to note that if you did click the autorun.exe, an error would pop up ‘Library not registered’.
Follow the on-screen instructions to install the game. Mine froze on the first disc on a sound file but hopefully yours goes through. If it doesn’t, the best advice I can give you in to clean the disc again. At the end it will ask you to install Direct X and Windows Media Player 9. Since The Movies was made 8 years ago, I’m pretty sure your system has surpassed those requirements. So don’t worry about it.
When it’s done installing you can try to play it normally. However I got the message to put in CD1 even though it was already in the drive. What you do is right click The Movies icon and select ‘Properties’ and go to the ‘Compatibility’ tab. Check the box where it says ‘Run the Program in Compatibility Mode’ and choose Windows 98/ME in the drop down menu.
Wa-la, it should work.
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