I managed to run the game on XP (previous attempts on 3 separate XP machines using GOG out-of-the-box installer faild) With help found on abandonware site I don't want to mention, here is what I did:

1) Install game to any folder
2) Create folder c:\games
3) Copy WARFB folder from GOG installation folder to C:\GAMES folder (or whatever folder you want, but then
you'll need to change paths in reg file)
4) Uninstall game LEAVING IN PLACE all shared unused libraries
5) Download attached file, delete jpg extension and run reg file to add appropriate entries to a registry
6) In compability options for exe set 256 color mode, set your gfx card in 256 mode and run the game

Hope that helps.

Big thumbs up for this! Should help a bunch of gamers get this up and running. Might even encourage some to play this when they're otherwise put off by the expectation that it won't work.

Home run! This method worked for me, too (in an XP virtual machine) -- thank you!

I tried getting the GOG release running on a few XP platforms (wine, native, VM), but the best I could get was the explorer.exe process maxing out one processor (looking for DLLs?). I then tried editing just the SotHR options in my registry to match those in your .reg file, but no change. I then made my registry entries parallel yours, but with my paths matching the GOG installation, which I left in place. No change, and all this running in 256 colors, which WHSHR.EXE requires. When I followed your procedure precisely, it worked. I'm guessing the critical difference is the game expecting the data types of your SharedDLL registry entries (binary - maybe a holdover from the Win95 registry?) or your short filenames. Thanks for posting!

Glad I could help. I wonder if this installation procedure works on 7/8.1/10 machines and could be solution to those bugs other users complain about.

How do I run that attached file? Having brainlock and only see the jpg file. Thanks!

Save the file to your computer, open a command prompt to the directory you saved the file in and type move b27d8d66814e5d51b844a262f222fe7ffa407f47.jpg sothrreg.reg

You could also turn on showing known file extensions and rename via Windows Explorer.

In appreciation for your help, I took a stab at your question and tried three installations on a reasonably fresh Win7 virtual machine. The GOG release worked out of the box every time; I could not get it to fail.

I tried install paths of varying length. My SharedDLL registry values were all Dwords set to 1 (first installation of those DLLs on that machine) instead of the binary values of your registry edit. I tried bumping the SharedDLL registry values randomly up to 4, since some of the more common ones like WinG were up there on my XP VM (hundreds of game installs), and then installing SotHR. It still ran (same download that failed originally on XP for me).

Maybe it's some other aspect of an older Windows build that causes the trouble, perhaps still related to the shared DLLs (those were real problem in this game's era), but I couldn't get a Win7 failure to try your fix on. It's a reminder of the difficulty of supporting as many machines as GOG does.

Not even 'Prepare for Battle' bug? Really strange. From forum entries I thought it's a common thing. Anyway, thx for your effort. What lesson we have from this release: as far as oldies & PCs are concerned - it is never as good as it seems on GOG's game card but it is also never as bad as it seems on the subforum :-)

Not yet, but I just remembered I'm running 32-bit Win7, which is not so common anymore. That means registry and file path differences.

Thank you tbruger! I can play the game thanks to your instructions and I was about to ask for a refund! I think I'll give the game another chance and monitor its stability etc. Still, it's a pity that it's such a hassle to get the game going and it doesn't work "out of the box". Best wishes to you and other SotHR gamers.