Nostalgia Trip! Help running rogue spear (long read)

Hey Duders, A good, old-fashioned, Windows game problem here:

After the whole Rainbow Six Siege reveal and trailer, I got an urge to play through the first three Rainbow Six games; so far only Rogue Spear and its' expansions cannot run successfully, and I wonder if anyone has any insight into this problem. In case anyone out there hasn't heard of Tom Clancy's FANTASTIC second entry in the Rainbow Six franchise, Rogue Spear runs on windows 95, 98, ME, & 2000. I've tried for a couple weeks by installing the game disks on various Windows OS, and since some of you might do the same, here's what I've found:

Windows 7:

"Works"

Nice framerate and visual quality. Menu music and movie audio doesn't play for the base game and expansions, screen occasionally flickers like crazy . Black Thorn (2nd expansion) won't start at all, just black screen and crash at launch.

Maybe an acceptable option, but I figured by using my old Windows disks I could find a better solution with a virtual machine.

NOTE: The next few Windows systems were all installed and run using VMware Player. Before, I tried Windows Virtual PC and VirtualBox... which didn't cut it for any 3D effects, BUT I could have missed something...

Windows 95 & 98:

Doesn't launch.

Install went great, but I should've noticed that 95 & 98 don't support D3D in VMware....

Windows ME:

Doesn't launch.

Install was great, but Direct 3D is supported here, so I'm really not sure on this one.

Windows 2000 Professional SP4:

Launch!

However, only in Software Rendering mode; using this gets me through everything (movie audio, music,etc), but the framerate is unplayable and everything looks terrible.

Using the Direct 3d graphics installed by VMware Tools, I launch and get this:

Looking up those errors, I found that USB devices disconnecting or connecting in the VM might cause this, but removing them did not fix this. I still suspect changing the "vmx_fb.dll" somehow could solve this, but that was based on many shady google results, my favourite being: "Install the .dll checker to repair your .dll's and speed up your computer!"

I've installed and reinstalled enough Virtual Machines, Windows OS, and updates for now, as well as repairing registry keys to no avail.

However, I still yearn to play Rogue Spear again, and I hope this might assist anyone in doing the same.

Sorry for the long first post, I've just been trying to solve this for a while.

Thanks very much duders, love the site!

I spent a long time not so long ago trying to get Rogue Spear in a working state, and it's bloody difficult. Makes me wish I still had my XP machine! Classic.

First post and he gets it in the Rogue Spear forum...most impressive!

You might be better off just playing the console version. PSX isn't hard to emulate.

That did cross my mind briefly, while I don't have access to a Mac and the PlayStation port left me SORELY disappointed, I do remember the Dreamcast port as surprisingly well done. Now, getting a Dreamcast emulator to cooperate with my laptop (having both an integrated Intel card and Nvidia) might push more trouble into this than already present.

Also, the Urban Operations expansion was real great, always screwing up the first mission by climbing the boxes and having a terrorist just snipe half my team, or mow down civilians by accident with stray MP5 shots...challenging no matter how good my mission plan was... a shame it didn't appear on the Dreamcast.

I have it working including covert ops, and urban ops in Windows 10, Nvidia GTX1080ti, 3770k. @ 1080p

First you need to download this WINED3d. Get it here: https://fdossena.com/?p=wined3d/index.frag

Read the "Readme" file. And look at the dx7 or older games part. Follow the steps in the Readme file!

Open RSConfig(.exe) Select your gpu and audio device.
DISABLE play videos (none of it wont work if you dont.)

Launch game selected game or addon.

Menu music wont work. In game music and audio does. I dont know why. If anyone has a workaround please let me know. Also the video/movie playback would be nice.
You might have to disable video/movie playback again after installing addons(Covert ops...).

There seems to be a bug that happens occasionally in my games. The crosshair fails to load on mission start and in requires a reboot of the game.

I have it working with fullscreen, high frame rate, in game videos + cd audio off the hard drive on Windows 8.1.

I used DDrawCompat for the first 3 https://github.com/narzoul/DDrawCompat/releases. Installation was as easy as copying the ddraw.dll to the root of my game install.

CD audio worked for me straight off the bat, however the music didn't loop correctly. I ripped my CD to the hard drive and used _inmm.dll to play it http://www.geocities.co.jp/Playtown-Domino/8282/. _inmm.dll also supports playing music from the CD if you're feeling nostalgic, however you will have to download some additional stuff to get that to work. All audio queues were correct and looped properly.

Video of the result https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzRqo82uOLc (couldn't record fullscreen)

I really wish they'd just release this on GOG. Easily my favorite tactical shooter. Hope you get it working.