Vista and Petz
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Here's proof that all the P.F.Magic games, including Babyz and Oddballz, and the Studio Mythos Petz 5, can be run on a computer running VISTA (ugh). Below is a screenshot, taken after I had brought out one or more petz in all of: Dogz original, Catz original, Oddballz, Petz II, Petz 3, Petz 4, Babyz, and Petz 5. As with the picture on my "Pointless Info" page, the picture is completely un-edited; all that's been done is to reduce the size and save as jpg instead of bmp.

MyChi is having a well-earned meal in Dogz 1, Jiggles is enjoying a game with a "grubz" mouse in catz 1, Snowball is being cute in the basket while Frosty runs around in Petz II, Pouncer is carrying her half-full foodbowl around in Petz 3, Scamp is enjoying a rare moment of peace, happily kneading a cushion, in Petz 4, Scaredy and Fluffy are larking about and waiting for the mouse in Petz 5, Vistatest is not too sure about the jar of food in Babyz, and Caramba! is about to eat his Liqui-Food in Oddballz.

Most of these games were simply copied across from my machine, so we haven't done tests to see if all of the installation files work, but we have tested that it's possible to adopt new Pets in all the games.

The two games which were actually installed properly were: the Dogz 1 game, installed from the demo on Minibyte's site and then made into the full game with my fooler. Petz 4, installed from the 120-megabyte demo (available on my site and elsewhere on the net), then "fooled" using Nicholas' Petza and finally run with a Registry fix.

All of the games from Petz II onwards, including Babyz, need a registry fix and (in most cases, anyway) Nicholas' Petza; without those they will crash at some stage.

Oddballz we think needs to have the XP fix -- we didn't try it without. Oddballz, Catz 1 and Dogz 1 need files which go in the Windows and System directories and which you can find in my foolers. The only files which are not at present in my foolers are the WinG dlls which you may or may not already have. If you get error messages about missing files with Wing in the name, you can grab them from here (click). Unzip them into your System or System32 directories.

You can get the Registry fixes for Petz II, Petz 3 and petz 4 here (click). Unzip them and then double-click on whichever reg file is for your game. You may wish to open the reg file in Notepad first and change all the places where you see, say, D:\\Games\\Petz3 to C:\\Program Files\\P.F.Magic\\Petz 3 or wherever you actually installed the game. You can get the Registry fix for Petz 5 here (click). Unzip it and move the Keys folder into your game's Resource folder, then double-click on the reg file -- but you may wish first to open it in Notepad and, wherever you see D:\\Games\\Petz5\\ change it to, say, C:\\Program Files\\UBI Soft\\Studio Mythos\\Petz 5\\ or wherever you installed the game. And finally, Babyz players can get their registry fix here (click). Unzip it and move the Keys folder into your game's Resource folder, then double-click on the reg file -- but you may wish first to open it in Notepad and, wherever you see D:\\Games\\babyznew\\ change it to, say, C:\\Program Files\\Mindscape\\Babyz or wherever you installed the game.

A note for those who are interested -- this was done on a machine with Pentium D CPU 2.80 GHz processors and 2.00 GB of Ram, under Vista Ultimate.