DIGITAL_DEVIL_DATABASE Community Forum

Tony wrote up a brilliant guide for XP that I used for my desktop computer, however, my new laptop is uhhh... portable, and a lot more powerful in most respects. It uses Microsoft Vista, though, and because of that, I've had problems getting kanji and the like to appear in game instead of crazy symbols. I went through the motions of getting Vista to be able to switch between Japanese and English on my taskbar, which messed up a lot of my programs for a while (error messages would appear in Japanese even when I had it set on English, for example). With this setting on, the characters were still weird symbols in IMAGINE.

So I figure someone has to know how to get this to work.

At first it seems that if you didn't purchase a regional version of Vista, you must upgrade to Ultimate as I recall. Perhaps this is intentional in the hope that some people will simply upgrade. But it is possible I found. I'm not sure / can't recall if I was just unfamiliar with Vista, or if the process was intentionally convoluted.

In any case, I can't remember the specifics, but I will post something asap. In the meantime rest assured it is possible and you can probably figure it out. I won't be booting Vista again tonight, sorry :(

editted: As for programs running in Japanese which normally would not, this is normal, and will not likely be avoidable, unless you can figure out something like AppLocale, which I'm unfamiliar with. Better programs tend to recognize the system locale and respond accordingly. Most programs tend not to, unless you have special versions however. I've never been bothered by this, but there should be a locale setting, which indicates you want Japanese fonts, but not to have your messages replaced with Japanese. I know as a programmer these facilities exist, but off the top of my head, I don't recall a control panel option by which to make such a distinction. Some more low level solution like AppLocale probably can, though I've never quite understood why Windows relies on second hand apps and third parties to expose its lower level functionalites.

Also, good luck with Vista and your graphics. When I installed Imagine the latest graphcs drivers available for my nVidia card have lots of texture corruption issues not exhibited by XP. New drivers might exist by now, though I haven't checked. Whenever I'm in highly populated zones with lots of new textures coming in, I inevitably start seeing textures changing to pixel junk. I would be interested to know if anyone else experiences this annoyance.

Yeah, I used AppLocale to run it in XP but Vista told me that AppLocale was obsoleted due to features in the OS itself. I followed Vista's instructions for setting it up and it basically affected everything BUT Imagine. I don't think the Microsoft website even let me download AppLocale because I have Vista.

The only weird thing I found graphically wrong with the game in my short time playing it on my laptop is that there are no widescreen settings, so the onscreen buttons are mapped awkwardly, I think I have to click a little to the left of each one, or press the keys corresponding to them, of course.

You should play in "windowed" mode.

I only play Imagine on the Vista install I have. I set it up to check it out, and couldn't use it for work, but I can set it up around Imagine. Its dedicated to Imagine now, because I'm afraid if I put anything else on it, I won't have harddisk space for Imagine  patches on the partition I allocated for it.

The only major problem I have, is I have to reboot my beefiest computer for Imagine/work, so I can't easily fiddle with Imagine and work at the same time.