Running Black Dahlia on modern PCs

I just played through the old PC adventure game Black Dahlia. It's a good game, well worth a look if you like adventure games. It's a full-motion video (FMV) based game spanning 8 CDs, with some OK acting and an entertaining (but confusing and sometimes illogical) plot.

The game was made in 1998 for Windows 95/98 and it's not that trivial to get it to work flawlessly. Here's how to do it.

If you are running a Windows version above Windows XP

If you are using any of these:

  • Windows Vista
  • Windows 7
  • Windows 8
  • Windows 10
  • Windows 11

...you most probably can't make the game work without a virtual machine. But still I recommend you to try it yourself, using the below game installation guide.

Installing Win95 / 98 on a virtual PC

1) Install Oracle VM Virtualbox and create a virtual PC

2) Install Windows 95 or 98 on the virtual PC

Get hold of a copy of Windows 95 or 98. Maybe the easiest to install is the Windows 95 floppy disk version. Here's a guide to help you with the installation.

3) Now that you have a working Windows 95 / 98 virtual computer, install the game and the patch as you would normally. You have to put the patch executable on a USB stick, CD image or a floppy to get it mounted on the virtual PC.

4) Run the game.

I tried the virtual machine solution myself, but with my somewhat slow computer, the video in the game was lagging. So I just ran the game directly in Windows XP with the below BD.INI tweaks.


Game installation, patch and tweaks

This is how you install and tweak the game itself.

If you have Windows XP or older, you could try to make it work with just these tips. You shouldn't need a virtual PC in that case. (When I wrote this guide I was still using Windows XP and this was all I needed.)

1) Install the game.
Put CD#1 in, and run the SETUP.EXE.

2) Download the Black Dahlia patch V1.1 from here or here.

Unzip bdpatch.zip, put the unzipped bdpatch.exe to the game folder and run it.

3) Try the game out and see how it works.

4) Apply tweaks if the game runs poorly

You don't have to use the windows 95 compatibility mode. For me, the 95 compatibility mode just made the mouse unresponsive. 

A problem with most modern computers is that when you get to play, the 360 degree view spins like hell when you try to look around, making the game unplayable. There's a solution to this.

If the 360 degree view is too fast, edit the configuration file BD.INI.
Edit these parameters:
spin edges = 1
spin vres = 2
spin hres = 2


spin edges = 1 tells the game to spin the view if the mouse is taken near the edges of the screen. This is a better way to navigate through the game, since you can also specify the speed of the "edge spinning".

The other important parameters are spin vres and spin hres. "2" is the lowest speed you can set, with "1" not moving at all. The lowest speed is okay for playing, or at least it was for me.

You can also change the edge sizes, but I didn't need to do that.

5) If you still have problems, try out the Virtual PC solution above. And you can always try asking for help in the comments below.

Good luck! Ask away if you have any questions!

UPDATE 2022/03: 

This article was published in august 2011. Since then a lot of the links etc had gone bad. So I did some updates on it. Here's the changes:

  • Changed title from Windows XP / Vista to just "modern PCs".
  • Removed dead links to Microsoft Virtual PC and related guides.
  • Added new link to bdpatch.exe
  • Added mentions of more modern Windows versions
  • Changed virtual machine to Oracle VM Virtualbox from Microsoft Virtual PC

Comments

  1. Hey this is great thanks! Only problem i have is that you can't save the INI file or at least i wasn't able to.

    I found that if you scroll real slow it works, but still it would be nice to slow it down.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Moebird.

    That's strange, you should be able to save the .ini file. What was the error message?

    Or it might be that the BD.INI was overwritten by the game or it's setup program (if it has one - I don't remember).

    For example, if you change the music volume, the data you changed in BD.INI might get overwritten with the default values in the progress.

    Try simply editing the BD.INI again.

    ReplyDelete
  3. well it says it's "read only" and before you say it, i already tried to uncheck the "read only" box and it says only an admin can do it.

    ReplyDelete
  4. OK... Then you'd need to get the rights and log in as an administrator to do it... I'm just wondering, if you don't have administration rights, how did you manage to install the game? :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. i dunno! I never thought about it i just installed it lol. The game was used when i bought it but that shouldn't matter right?

      is there another way get admin rights?

      Delete
  5. Right-click on notepad icon in start menu and select "run as administrator". Then browse to the folder containing BD.INI, make the changes and save it.

    ReplyDelete
  6. thanks for the explanation! I have the English version and I need the patch that translates the game in Italian .... or at least it has subtitles! Where can I find the file? Thank you!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to install and play Curse of Monkey Island on Android

How to get rid of coil whine just by tweaking BIOS

How to fix the weird audio bug in Kingdom Come: Deliverance

Where does uTorrent keep its .torrent files?

Minecraft recv failed error... fixed!