Getting Zoo tycoon running correctly.

[matt167]

My wife has wanted to play Zoo Tycoon again for a while, and she lost the discs years ago. So for Christmas I found a good set of discs and got them for her.

Her laptop of course has no disc drive, AND the discs have some form of copy protection which prevents me from grabbing iso files. They come up as corrupt.

My fix was to install the game on the computer with a disc drive ( base game and marine expansion) and copy it to her computer and used a nocd exe. It works. However, I think there is something not right as it has all the marine mania content but doesn’t load the marine title screen. It loads the base title screen, and the maint workers will not pick up trash and the assigned task button doesn’t work. assigned tasks are part of the expansion so I think it’s not loading the expansion at all, just the expansion game files, creating a glitch.

Is there a way to copy a copy protected disc into an iso? The only other way I can think of doing it is to share the disc drive over the network and direct install but it will still need the nocd exe… but also I do want a backup set of discs. For such an old game it wasn’t cheap

 

[TheHig]

The OG Zoo Tycoon? Try Abandonware:

https://www.abandonwaredos.com/abandonware-game.php?abandonware=Zoo+Tycoon&gid=3186

 

[Dopamin3]

I'm not familiar with this game or the specific nocd, but the nocd or not installing it directly on the target machine is probably what is causing the content to not load correctly.

Let's backtrack and start with a simpler option. Get an inexpensive USB CD/DVD drive and just hook it up to her computer and install the game normally. Perhaps you will need to launch the game in compatibility mode.

As for making the copy protected disk into ISO you could try CloneCD. It should have a free trial period that will allow you to copy all the disks long before it expires and needs purchased.

 

[Nobu]

Yeah, frequently expansions back in the day either patched or entirely replaced the game executable. You'll either need a nocd exe for the expansion or you'll have to install it the normal way.

 

[matt167]

Yeah, frequently expansions back in the day either patched or entirely replaced the game executable. You'll either need a nocd exe for the expansion or you'll have to install it the normal way.

This is kind of exactly what I was thinking. It was really late when she told me it wasn’t working right so I didn’t have time to look into it. She played it for about 4 hours