I am having problems reading some of the text that is displayed in the game.

For example when speaking to the wise man in the towns the most important bit is written in black (I think) but it's written on a very dark (if not black) background... So the wise man will say something like:
"To defeat the evil knight
you must first
**Too dark to read**"

Another example (I think this may be a different problem) is when just before dualing a creature it pops up a text box (with nothing in) then when you click on the screen to start the actual dual (to change the screen to the dual screen) the text pops up very quickly so you get the feeling it says something like "This creature will start with a Blaa Blaa" or something to that effect (never actually managed to read it).

Does anyone know a soultion to this?

One thing I have been looking into is to try and change the background picture (or at least the bottom left hand side of it) so that its more of a grey colour so that I can read both texts. The problem there is that it looks like the background pictures are in a .pic format which I cannot view/modify. I have downloaded a 'bio-rad' image converter but that doesn't like them either.

I hope someone can help :-)

P.S. apart from that I am having great fun spending hours and hours rekindling my youth. Thanks everyone with the useful info so far.

i finally got the cards that were missing to appear in the deck editor. however it crashes as soon as i try to move my mouse over to one of the cards. basically i have the same problem as ilaws who posted earlier except i don't use a logitech mouse. even using the touchpad makes the deck editor crash.
i have all the updates including the latest manalink version, any help would be appreciated. thanks.

For me, most everything is working, but I cant see any of the text when I open Shandalar. Shandalar is basically the only one I care about playing, so if anyone could help me out....? *begging face*

You guys all rock. Thanks for helping me to finally play this awesome game again.

Just to confirm some of the suggestions given here, I was getting "Assertion error" trying to install on WinXP-SP2, did a quick google and found this site.

Downloaded the patched game from "the-underdogs" and unpacked it as per their instructions. I noticed that there seemed to be a complete directory structure in the unpacked files so I tried Magic.exe from there and it ran perfectly. It seems you can safely forget about your old installations. I copied all my old decks over and can play a duel perfectly.

Next I tried deck builder, and got the disappearing card tray problem, so further searching led to me disabling NVidia from Task Manager - it was the only RunDll32 process going so I guessed it was the NVidia driver. I didnt need to touch anything else. I have a generic brand cordless keyboard and mouse, Control Panel reports Microsoft drivers. Now the deck builder works perfectly as well and I'm happy as a pig in mud.

I dont play in Shandalar much so I can only report that I tried it and it seemed to work OK but did crash after about 10 minutes. I might try again soon and see if it repeats, but I am an old deck builder from way back and prefer to challenge myself in Gauntlet. Now if I could just get them tournament legal

Still can't get the deck builder to work in XP.

I'm using a microsoft-compatible mouse...so I doubt that's the problem. There's nothing running on my startup or taskmanager with the name of nView, nVidea, or nAnything...so that's not the problem either.

The only thing running a rundll32 process is called CnsMin, which when googled, comes up as a Trojan or Spyware, or something of that sort, called "Chinese MEssage" or something. But, the thing is, I'm using my wife's brother's computer, who is Taiwanese, and thus speaks Chinese and uses chinese on his computer...so, I think it's best to leave that alone. So hopefully that's not the problem, but if it is, I guess I'm SOL. Any more help on getting the Deck Builer to work in XP would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for the link to the Underdogs... Really didn't help that much, but good to find the game with such an easy installer (previously I had to install all the updates manually).
I have mainly the same problem as most of the people here, no cards appear at the bottom row in Deck build/edit EXCEPT for Air Elemental. Don't know why this happens... I've been busting my ass off trying to find a solution, but I either lack the proper tools or I am just not good enough with solving this kind of problems.
I didn't always have this problem. It started when I had a different install of MtG installed and has continued to this day, even with manual registry clean-up and a new installation of MtG. I think it MAY have something to do with my keyboard. I use a Logitech Internet Navigator Special Edition and if I remember correctly (may not be so) the problem appeared when I installed drivers for the keyboard...

I also noticed that I get no text ingame when I don't have ati2evxx.exe running. This is the driver for my Radeon 9600 PRO, so Radeon users might want to check their Catalysts and make sure they are running... Hope this piece of info can help someone.

Does anyone how how I can use Cyclopean Tomb in the game? It's supposed to be pay 2 mana and tap to turn target land into a swamp, but the Tomb never ever seems to turn that yellow colour that indicates you can use it.

I found a possible solution to the deck editor issue. I read on another thread that one guy went through and ended processes one at time until he found the culprit. I did this. My culprit was aoldial.exe. (I am starting to hate AOL. It has only take 10 years to decided I don't like them. LOL) I ended aoldial.exe on both of the machines I have DotP installed on with the manalink patch.

Now I can build decks again!!!!!!!!!!

I hope this helps.

Dude

There is a new patch out. (an unofficial patch) and it will get dotp or mtg working in an nt enviroment no emulation (or compatiblity modes) required. Search for "unofficial patch 'magic the gathering'"

;-)

Cyclopian tomb

Due to a glitch cyclopian tomb can only be used during an upkeep phase. This also varies with patches. You need the NT patch.

YEEEHAAA!!! I found my erroring process: UltraMon.exe

srthndude, You are THE saviour of my game...

It does indeed appear, that everyone has one process that prevents the cards from showing in the deck editor. The only way I can think of of how to find it is by trial and error.
It might be, that the Deck.exe tries to reserve a memory location, that is used by some other program (or something like that anyway) and because of this it can't load the cards correctly in the editor. But I'm NOT gonna start looking for this. My game works and that's just fine with me.

Hey Guys, thanx to your posts, I got Shandalar to work great on XP!
No deck editing problems or anything!

I hope that everybody else can get similar results as well.

Alright, So I followed the "underdogs" instructions to the "T". I have found what process I need to eliminate in order to see cards in the Deck.exe. Now, when I enter Duel, in solo duel and gauntlet, I get about one minute into the game, and it crashes. This has been steady thus far, I have no idea what the problem is. I have read through this forum and can find no other problem like this. I simply enter a duel, then it crashes about one minute into it... I would appreciate any help that can be given because I really wanna get into playing this game!

The error I recieve is:

C:\DOCUME~1\Owner\LOCALS~1\Temp\de44_appcompat.txt

I am running (XP home sp2; 512 ddr; x800 ati; soundblaster audigy; logitech mouse; microsoft natural pro keyboard)

I have limited the problem of my game crashing down to the "right-clck" function of my logitech mouse. I can play as long as I want as long as I don't use "richt-click" twice. as soon as I use it twice the game gets the error and crashes.

Any suggestions?

Hi
Ive installed vmware virtual pc with win98, and magic works almost perfectly. My problem is that everytime a wizard taps a city it crashes. For some reason it cant show the small movie-clip with the evil wizards after theyv taken over a city. The screen just turns black after the newsflash that says wizard x has just tapped city x. Any ideas?
Mvh Kasper

I was having problems, no text on the cards, and the button that appears in the middle to tell you when to play an instant and to click done was appearing SUPER long and you couldnt read it. I tried all the patches and compatibility with absolutely no luck.
Figured out, all i had to do was turn the hardware acceleration down in the display settings a couple notches, worked fine, when im done just turn it back up

I was having problems running Deck.exe as well, kept crashing on me, I've got an ATI Mobility Radeon 9000...

I cured the problem by dropping my screen resolution down to 800x600, I think that the game will also work with 1024x768, I think it has to do with the card art and sprites only working in those resolutions there are a couple of files in the magic directory that start off with 800 and 1024, and I believe that's what they imply.

And that's how I got the game to work on my comp, so I don't believe I'm completely off my rocker.

ok iv downloaded a really big file (mtgv125) and i copyd all of those files to the install dir and everything works (just cant see cards yet) but besides that i was wondering if someone could tell me how to slow Shandalar down it works i can fight with all the people...just donno where im going cause its moveing to fast i just run into things and sometimes hit a town that or im already to the other side of the map so if any one has any ideas????? and how do u turn off nview nothing says its runing and i donno what the prosses name is so if anyone can help thex in advance

Does anyone know how to get manalink to work over a LAN. I have installed the game from underdog and updated it with the manalink patch. But I can't figure out how to connect to another computer on the LAN? help and thanks


Ed

Hey all,

Just got this awesome game. It worked perfectly until I started screwing around with mana link so that I could duel against my roomate... Now everything is messed... at first there was no text in the game, so I uninstalled and wiped the reg key. Now there are just no card names. Everything else works ok...

Any Ideas??

Thanks,
Kaos

There seems to be a bug in xfire (www.xfire.com) that causes the deck editor to lose all the cards except for that one aqua card.

If I close down xfire, the cards appear. Run it, the cards disappear. On / off on / off.

So, to fix the Magic The Gathering: Planes of Shandalar / Spells of the Ancients / Duels of the Planeswalkers invisible / missing cards in the deck editor (deck.exe) problem, I simply closed down good ol' xfire.

None of my other utils (AIM, Logitech joystick applet, kerio firewall, mIRC, etc) caused a problem, nor my Nvidia drivers for my geforce 5200. (Although I did fiddle with the applications specific settings, forcing antialiasing, ansiotropy, etc etc to off, not that I think that was to blame. Can't be bothered to set it back though)

i bought magic the gathering off of ebay. i tried to install it. it said i needed a certain video thing so i downloaded it and it loaded then i tried to install the game and it says only for windows 95. i got all the pacthes and it doesnt work. what do i have to do. ive been to underdogs and everythin. can anyone help me i have all 3 game, duels of the planeswalker, and spells of the ancients.

i got mine to work and manalink, too. no bugs, it seems. but now i want to play online and all the manalink websites were shut down.

how can i meet people online to play?

thanks, e-mail me if you can, Radakassst@yahoo.com

Well, I downloaded the 76 meg file from HotU and unzipped it, so the files are now residing in C:/Magic. I noticed that the archive seemed to have Manalink 1.3 and unofficial patch 1.3.2 already installed, so I didn't install them (again). I double-clicked the "Magic.reg" file to apply the registry changes. Everything seems to be working perfectly! All the cards show in the deck builder; Shandalar works great (if a little fast), I get in AND out of duels with (almost) no problems (some text goes by to fast to read when the screen changes), and even got Manalink to work over by wireless network at home. I'm running WinXP Home (SP2) on my desktop, and WinXP Pro (SP2) on my laptop, and there seem to be no problems with either! My wife is extremely happy, which can only mean good things for me!

--Dave

I followed the instructions by ShadowM and the game works perfectly running under Windows XP. Actually it runs better now than it did under Windows 98. Now I wish someone out there would update the card database.