Lofland bLOG

Douglass Adams created a video game called Starship Titanic. It is a must-see for any fan of his work.

However, it does not work properly on Windows XP. I used to run it on Windows 98, but my most recent computer has a video card that has no drivers for Windows 98.

What happens on XP, is that the game runs fine, but there are “blank” spots in the game. What those are is places where the program uses AVI files to play video clips.

The culprit is the iccvid.dll file. The latest version just does not work for this game. The file, in XP, is in c:\windows\system32

The solution: Just copy iccvid.dll from an older system into Starship Titanic’s directory! I am told that the file from XP SP1 works. I haven’t tried that yet. I used a file from Windows 98, and it works great!
So, if you want to run Starship Titanic on XP, just get an old version of iccvid.dll and put it in C:\program Files\The Digital Village\Starship Titanic\ You do not need to bother the non-working dll in c:\windows\system32\ , because the program will look in the local directory FIRST for the dll and then in the system32 directory later.

If you do not have an old copy of iccvid.dll, I have put a copy of it here on my web site. iccvid.dll This is from Windows 98 SE. It is version 1.10.0.6

Here is a newer version of ICCVID.DLL that I found on the web here. It is version 1.10.0.11 I think it might work slightly smoother than the Windows 98 file.

Note the version in XP that does NOT work is 1.10.0.12, so the above is apparently the most recent that will work. I also find it interesting that the files get smaller as the versions get newer.

Again, please do not risk putting this this file in c:\windows\system32, instead just put it in the directory with the ST.exe file (the Starship Titanic executable). It will use the copy that is in the folder with it. It searches there first.

(BTW, I found this out by using FileMon from SysTernals. That is an awesome troubleshooting program!)