I already own the GOG version of Quake, but I have a CD version of it now, so I thought it'd be fun to do a pure install of the full game. It's the shareware disc, but apparently it's super easy to crack it to run the full version with a tool called qcrack.exe (Hey, I own the game twice, it's okay). Problem is, the installer for the full version on the root of the disc is a 16 bit windows application, won't work on my 64 bit 7, not even in compatibility mode. Should I go for a virtual machine to run this setup.exe?

I hardly believe you can crack the Quake shareware into the full version, for the simple reason that it misses data. (The tarbaby monster for example).

You can probably force the start level to open the doors, but going to the exits will simply give you an error as the levels are not there.

In the id1 directory is the data, in the shareware version you get only one file (pak0.pak). In the full two (pak0.pak and pak1.pak).

It didn't crack the shareware, it unlocked a separate full install of Quake that was also on the disc. Funny enough that disc also has the early Doom series as well as Heritic and Hexin; Wolf3D too IIRC.

(edit: oops!)

Use DOSBox and CWSDPMI to run qcrack, you'll need it

-- Instructions in VOGONS: http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=3863
-- CWSDPMI link :http://homer.rice.edu/~sandmann/cwsdpmi/index.html

Have tried it with the latest DOSBox version for Windows on top of Win7 x64 and the program runs and shows the help (don't have the CD with me to test fully).

Regarding the Setup app: you will need to install a WinXP machine (or even W98) to run the installer, Win7 x64 doesn't have support for 16-bit applications I believe. And in that case, you can skip the DOSBox setup and just run everything there.

It worked when you mount it with MagicIso (free), You can also unpack it with BandiZip.