Kotor 1 Win xp 64 (knights of the old republic)

Well I've tried everything possible to run this game. The game itself would run ok after a few short steps but I could not get in game movies to display. After about 3 hours of trying everything short of decompiling the program here is my guide on how to run it on win 7 64. This includes fixing .bik movie playback in game. my specs Win7 64/ i7 860/ 8GB/ ATi HD 5700

1. Install the game with administrator privileges. Browse to setup.exe on disk. right click. run as administrator.
2. Browse to game location right click install folder uncheck Read Only, click apply.
3. Run desktop shortcut and select update from the menu to update the game to version 1.03. Do not download patches from web as they can be incompatible with your version.
4. Download no cd from the internet. site gamecopyworld is good for this. I do not condone piracy. This is suggested for reason of win7 incompatibility with included version of securerom known to malfunction on win7. Also with this you can use high resolution patcher if you would like to play past 1600x1280 resolution (explained later)
4. download no cd extract it replace swkotor.exe make a shortcut to it as you will be using it to run the game. As always back up the original before replacing.
5. download mss32.dll compatible with win7. Here is the link. It says Kotor 2 but it works for 1 as well. Download it. back up the original. replace the original dll. This fixes EAX support.
6. Last steps of making game playable. create shortcut to swkotor.exe. Select compatibility tab. Check:
-Run this program in compatibility mode for: Winxp SP2
-Run program as Administrator
7. run swconfig.exe or select config from launcher. Here Enable VSync. Select your desired resolution. Enable/Disable hardware mouse. This is trial and error depending on your system. Enable it run the game if your mouse does not work at the main menu, then Quit (may have to ALT+F4). Run swconfig again and try the disabling hardware mouse option. In case you do not care about fixing movie playback just disable them here and everything should work fine.
-in case you are still having trouble try to open swkotor.ini and change FullScreen setting to FullScreen=0. This will make game run in windowed mode

PS for Steam version:
Do everything exactly the same but also disable In-Game Steam Overlay for KoToR.
This is done through Steam Library - right click KoToR and selecting Properties.


This part is for getting .bik movies to work.
I've tried everything as on my system Kotor during movies would just show black blank screen, aka monitor in Power Savings and play audio only as well as sometimes crash the game period.
After trying these things that did not work. Reencoding movies to avi format, trying 7 different versions of binkw32.dll, installing Rad Game Tools, embedding player into the files with bink feature and as last resort dual booting to winxp32. Nothing fixed this. Here is how I've finally was able to overcome this problem.

-download and install Rad Game Tools. This maybe optional I do not know. Search web for a link as company is in biz and these are free with size of only 1.5 MB. Plus with this you can play a lot of movies out of game as thousands of games use this codec/tools.
-In case you are in similar situation and your screen is an LCD with refresh rate of 60 at native resolution play the game at lower resolution as long as refresh rate of screen selected when running swconfig.exe is higher than 75. For me I had to select 800x600 resolution for this. There is no explanation on why this works but it does work.
-Another solution open swkotor.ini and change FullScreen setting to FullScreen=0. This will make game run in windowed mode.
-Other untried by me solution is to install widescreengaming patcher. Here is the link it explains the process in detail.


Also in case you are experiencing Endar Spire random crashes
Try opening swkotor.ini and added a line into the [Graphic Options] section:
Disable Vertex Buffer Objects=1

PS: In case you want to play in higher resolutions than originally supported run widescreengaming patcher. Here is the link it explains the process in detail.

I hope this helps and saves people hours of aggravation that were experienced by me.