Installing "Hello Kitty Dream Carnival" on Windows Vista

(or: How to work around the stupidity of the people who write software installers)

Last weekend I upgraded my daughter's PC to Windows Vista, largely in a quest to improve its ability to withstand the morass of malware that is out there. The upgrade was almost entirely successful; whereas it used to be impossible, with Windows XP, to run many of her games in a non-administrator account, I have yet to find any that will not run in a restricted account under Vista. Big improvement!

I did run into a couple of problems, however. The most annoying was my inability to install "Hello Kitty Dream Carnival." This was something of a surprise, as I had no trouble installing "Hello Kitty Cutie World." If you are having the same problem you should read on, as it turns out to be easy to fix. But first, let's look at the problems.

The first stumbling block is that the software installer claims that I don't have an "adequate" version of Windows. What the fools have done is check to be sure that you're running Windows 95, 98, ME, or XP. It simply won't allow you to run on anything else, even if it's newer. On the one hand you can see why they don't want to support an OS they could not have tested in advance; on the other, Microsoft is pretty good at providing backward compatibility -- so it would be nice to at least give it a chance.

If you like, you can temporarily work around this by changing the registry key that applications use to discover the Windows version. (If you are familiar with using the registry editor write me a note and I'll tell you the key. If you are not, it's kind of dangerous and I don't recommend it. It might not matter anyway.) This hack works for a lot of installers, and indeed gets you past the OS version check of "Hello Kitty Dream Carnival"'s installer just fine. Unfortunately if you're using Vista you may well be unable to get much farther because the person who wrote the installer had very little foresight.

After the installer is tricked into believing it's running on Windows XP, it gets to the point where it is looking at your machine to see whether it has adequate hardware to perform the install. As far as I can tell, it has a math error such that if your hard drive is larger than 128G (not uncommon these days) it believes the drive has no available space (negative available space, actually). It then complains that your computer "is not adequate" even though, in truth, it's much more adequate than necessary.

Short of shrinking my disk temporarily, which is more of a hassle than the game is worth, I couldn't find a way around that problem. So I started looking to see if there was a way to install it if I had an unpacked version to work with.

It's my practice to back up my machines prior to upgrading the OS; too many things can go wrong. So I went to the back-up copy and found the installation for "Hello Kitty Dream Carnival". I copied it into the "Program Files" directory on the Vista machine, and ran the game.

I didn't expect it to work right away; most modern Windows games have a host of Windows Registry settings that are necessary for operation. But this game is old enough, or simple enough, that it doesn't have any such requirements. It just works!

So, if you are having trouble installing this game on Windows Vista, it does work -- you just have to find an already-installed version and copy it to the new computer. If you can't find an intalled version (because, for instance, you didn't bother to make a back-up) drop me a line and maybe we can find one for you.

This is, of course, a completely unsupported configuration so far as ValueSoft is concerned -- as they told me in no uncertain terms when I asked if there was a way to work around the installer issue.
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