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Lego Chess Crash Fix?


Ninja-Trix
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One of my favorite classic Lego games was and still is Lego Chess, but running it on Windows 10 is nearly impossible. I installed the patch to fix the disc read error and can play the game but after certain random actions it just crashes. I also am forced to run the game in a lower resolution due to a lack of options. If anybody has any tips to lower the crash rate or stop it altogether I am all ears.

Summary: Game boots and is playable but crashes often.

Edit:

WE DID IT! 15 MONTHS LATER AND WE FINALLY FIXED IT!

I would first like to thank RoboMWM for his discovery of the fix on 11/19/2020. He found that the game needs you to have an A drive regardless of where it is. You could map the disc drive you use to play the game to A or map it to a hard drive. The game looks for this directory and if it can't find it the game crashes.

 

The Fix:

Change one of your drives to "A" by going to "Disk Engagement" in Windows 10, right clicking on the drive you wish to assign (Can't be your main drive, use a backup or secondary partition.), and click "Change Drive Letter and Paths..." You may then select "A" and confirm the action.

You will also need to run the game in compatibility mode for Windows 95 and use administrator privileges.

Run In Higher Resolution:

Although the game has locked resolutions you can still increase them by going to "Start Menu" "Lego Media" and selecting "Chess Configuration". You may need to run it with compatibility settings but when it boots you can selected a resolution from the menu up to 1280X1024.

 

Because of the great work of the community this 15 month journey has finally met its end. I just finished my first successful match of Lego Chess with no saves or crashes and the intro that I haven't seen in years played as well. I thank you all for your work and hope we can all enjoy this game together.

Ninja-Trix out.

Edited by Ninja-Trix
Updating with new information.
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To my knowledge the crash rate cannot be avoided.. I think I got it working on Win10 but didn't play it. I did play it more extensively on its "original hardware," a WinXP machine - and even then, it still crashed.

 

IIRC Lego Chess does have a save-load function, so you can just save every few turns or so. But doing so can be slow and annoying - and it's really demoralizing to lose your progress and your chain of thought, regardless of how much is lost.

 

 

Not sure what can be done about the resolution though.

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MinifigRenderer

It doesn't crash if you save the game after every move on a virtual Windows XP PC. Also worked alright and with cutscenes on my old XP machine back in early 2000s

I have a graphics issue with a couple of the old LEGO games in my collection. One is creator kk not showing cutscenes but playing audio, or not showing tutorial levels properly on screen, the other is chess with vertical lines in game and no cutscenes except the in game animated cutscenes. One day either me or someone else will get cutscenes working.

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  • 8 months later...

When I try to win the level in story mode, when appears "Checkmate! Red wins!" and I click OK, the game crashes for no reason

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  • 4 weeks later...
On 4/19/2020 at 6:42 PM, LegoFan13 said:

When I try to win the level in story mode, when appears "Checkmate! Red wins!" and I click OK, the game crashes for no reason

I am having the same problem. I'm trying to create a 100% complete save file, but the game crashes too often. I'm running Windows 10 LTSC 64-bit.


I've been able to play through the story and get all the videos added to my scrapbook collection, but I am not able to finish the third game of each story mode.
The tutorial mode crashes pretty frequently, and I can't use the save function that is in normal games to try to progress through it.
The save function is otherwise the saving grace for getting through a normal chess game.
Also, on the side, I haven't figured out what the third page of the scrapbook is -- perhaps someone here knows.

 

Eventually I'll set up a VM for the sole purpose of completing this game, but if anyone has a 100% save file I would greatly appreciate an upload.

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4 hours ago, meo3333 said:

lego chess not install on windows 10 64 bit

I was able to set it up on my 64-bit machine by using a 32-bit installer fix that I found online. The default installer is 16-bit but the game itself is 32-bit, if I am not mistaken.
There are a couple different 32-bit installers out there, they should be easy to find just by searching.

 

Installing is just the first step. Getting this game to be playable outside a virtual machine was difficult.

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It crashes when I try to restart the level when I click OK on the message "Stalemate! No legal moves! It's a draw!" too

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I had the same experience, so I went ahead and set up Windows XP 32-bit on a virtual machine.
I did a fresh install of the game and updated it with the patch and CD fix.
Now it runs without crashing, and I can complete the tutorial section without a hiccup.

Edit: Only thing I couldn't get were the intro videos and cutscenes. If anyone knows where they need to be placed to be able to be played, I'd appreciate the info.

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  • 3 weeks later...

My VirtualBox virtual machine does not work anymore on my Windows 10 update, so I can't use Windows XP

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  • 4 weeks later...

Using PCem (an emulator) works for me, can play Lego Chess fine. Only problem is I slow down to 50% speed on every intro video and story cutscene.

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Hi.

I'm trying to get this running for my son.

I managed to install it using a 32 bit installer, apply the patch and then the CD fix.

Now the game runs, but it crashes randomly very often.

Does anyone at all have any idea about how to solve this problem?

I've installed nGlide and it hasn't made any difference. 

Thank you.

On 7/8/2020 at 5:58 PM, ALVASV said:

Using PCem (an emulator) works for me, can play Lego Chess fine. Only problem is I slow down to 50% speed on every intro video and story cutscene.

Hi. Which operating system did you install on that emulator?

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  • 1 month later...
On 7/8/2020 at 8:58 AM, ALVASV said:

Using PCem (an emulator) works for me, can play Lego Chess fine. Only problem is I slow down to 50% speed on every intro video and story cutscene.

I can't set up PCem, I need a website to run Windows XP on my browser!

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  • 3 months later...
On 7/12/2020 at 9:37 PM, Abdullah said:

Hi.

I'm trying to get this running for my son.

I managed to install it using a 32 bit installer, apply the patch and then the CD fix.

Now the game runs, but it crashes randomly very often.

Does anyone at all have any idea about how to solve this problem?

I've installed nGlide and it hasn't made any difference. 

Thank you.

Hi. Which operating system did you install on that emulator?

Hi sorry for the late reply, haven't checked this forum in months. I installed Win98 SE

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FYI, there's no need for the patch. The game looks for the CD drive starting with drive letter A. If drive letter A isn't found then it just gives up immediately. Use Disk Management to map either your real optical drive or mounted ISO to A (doesn't matter where the media is, there just needs to exist some partition/drive mounted on A:).

 

I've been able to play with 0 crashes on Windows 10. The avi cutscenes don't play, but I'm wondering if that's a codec issue, as I can't play the .avi's video portion with Windows 10's default video player. (Update: Run the game in compatibility mode, e.g. Windows 95, to get the cutscenes to play on Windows 10.) The cutscenes do play on the Windows XP VM though (after adding a floppy drive, as A seems to be reserved there).

 

Randomly figured this out as I was testing it on my physical Windows XP box, and then wondering for a few hours just how it could possibly be working there with no problems while having issues with my Windows XP and Windows 98 VM.

 

Update: Decided to check back here and saw OPs edit. Thanks Ninja-Trix for the compatibility mode find! Didn't think of messing around with that to get cutscenes working; now I no longer need the Windows XP VM anymore.

 

IMO I'm kinda surprised nobody else figured this out. I'm guessing a combination of there being a patch + a very small community means that the probability of someone trying to explore a non-patch way to run the game was very unlikely. I'm not sure of the best way to add this information to this wiki I found when trying to get it to run (https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Lego_Chess), but I did put the info in the discussion section: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Talk:Lego_Chess

Edited by RoboMWM
compatibility mode allows cutscenes to play + wiki info + typo
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