Anyways, before reformatting the old HD I did a simple copy of it to a second HD (yes, my machine has an SSD and two HDs) so that I could reference all my old programs, settings, bookmarks, shortcuts, etc. It took abit of time for all those gigs to be copied but boy am I glad I did.
First trouble was with win7. The install went ok but after about a full day of watching the windows updater look for updates, then troubleshooting it, then playing around with it, then watching it for another full day it finally updated my win7 overnight while I slept. I don't know the reason/reasons for the long delay. Were the update servers overloaded due to all the last-minute win10 downloads? Was it because I had not bothered to activate my win7 during that first day? I tried to manually install some of the bigger update packages like .NET and Service Pack 1, but the Microsoft download website would not work right. I would press the big Download button, and then I would immediately get the "thank you for downloading" page...but there was never a download. Why? Dunno.
Next was the trouble with EQ...and perhaps Lillu should take note of some of this. For years now, the UF I have been using has been a UF that I "created", i.e., I found the best UF online that I could find (an adventure unto itself) and then applied the EQEmu recommended patches and then did even more patches that were needed but not mentioned. But this time, I decided to use the UF that THF offers, but all I got was the infamous "unsupported app" msg. And when I gave up trying to figure out why, I copied my old UF but got the also infamous d3dx9_30 error. Sigh....
After much teeth gnashing and forum reading, here is what was happening.
The THF downloads were crap. Corrupted. And not just once. I tried downloading from all three sites several times and every download was corrupt. The way that you can tell beforehand is simple. Doubleclick the zip file and then double click the everquest folder that you will see. Note that you are not trying to extract the files, you simply want to look at them. Make sure the window that is showing the files is in Details mode rather than icon mode, ie, you can see file size. Then click on the column heading entitled "compressed size". Click it so it sorts the files by size...this will make the next step easy. There should be only two files that are zero in size, notes.txt and olddranik_assets.txt. If you see what I did, ie, pages and pages of zero byte files then your EQ is hosed. If you then alphabetize by filename and look at eqgame.exe and see its zero size instead of the 5104k size, then you will know why windows did not know what to do with it.
I don't have an answer for why those downloads were always corrupted. I tested my connection/system with the ping test in the command window and it showed no packet loss. PingPlotter also showed no packet loss from me to the download servers (except for the anti-flood firewalls). I have downloaded and installed a million times from the internet just everyone else has, and not had a problem. I just...dunno.
And as for the d3dx9 error, that's because UF was written back when DirectX version 9 was the latest thing. UF looks for that, but most of us do not have that installed because the latest version is 11. If you have a fresh install of win7 then you will NOT have it. Keep in mind that when we install UF, we are not really "installing", we are simply copying. There is no install process that looks at the version you have and then installs a hook/subroutine that says "hey EQ, I know you want version 9 but we got version 11 so use that instead, its ok that d3dx9 is not here." To fix this problem you need to install it. There is another forum entry where Nilbus gives a link to a Microsoft download page but note that that did not work for me. That download page puts a small "webinstall" program on your machine which, when clicked, checks to see what version you have. If, like me, you got version 11 then it takes two seconds to say "all done". In other words, it does nothing because it sees you already have a "better" version. What you need is the Redistributable of version 9. This type of file does not do a check of what you already have. And no, clicking on the Redistributable link that is on that webpage will not work either. Type into your browser "directx 9c redistributable" and you should get a list of links, one of which is to a Microsoft page that will say in red "DirectX Enduser Runtimes (June 2010). When you hit Download, the filename that pops up should be directx_Jun2010_redist.exe. This is the right one. Download and install. After that, I copied over my old UF, and the old shortcut, and it worked.
I can now log on to THF and play...but not with the EQ that THF supplies. And that should be a concern for Lillu/Vaion. Reading the forums will show that I am not the only one who has had problems. How many potential players has THF lost because the users could not make EQ work? How many would go thru the hassle of trying to troubleshoot? I suspect that they don't...not when there are a million other games that they can play on their cellphone. There needs to be more information on the player introductory page. Not alot of players are going to have a computer old enough to still have DirectX9 files on them. Not alot of users are going to catch that EQ is "not supported" simply because the download is often corrupt. There needs to be an alternative method of getting UF...a way whose quality can be checked and confirmed.
