Medieval: Total War won't work on any computer I've tried... help?

Medieval: Total War won't work on any computer I've tried.

So, I've tried this game on many, many computers, including my main Windows 8.1, A Windows XP, Vista, 98... 2000, too.

In my main Windows 8.1, it shows the splash: "Medieval: Total War", and then it goes, staying in Task Manager, but not showing any game.

In the XP, (all the other computers were Virtual Machines, run in Virtual Box) it installed properly, as it did in all the other computers, but it would always have problems initialising DirectX. It would say things in the error.txt document like:

DirectX call : ERR_INVALIDCAPS

or something like that. And sometimes:

DirectX call : ERR_NOINTERFACE

Any ideas...? This is quite frustrating.

Solution 1:

First of. Trying to run the game in VBox will most likely fail if it is DX based.

Secondly, Make sure you installed the DirectX that is on the disk.(could be 7 or 9, IDK). [Another note, DX 8 (if I remember correctly) was very, very buggy and gave a lot of problems]

Third: Try running the game in compatibility mode. Normally this is a long shot and it wont work. :(

Fourth: You could try to reclaim it on steam (or buy a new copy if possible) , but there is a good chance that it might still give you a bunch of issues. There is a lot of people that bought the steam version with CTD(crash to desktop) problems.

Fifth: Trying to run the game in Windows 8.1 will probably not work, even with a lot of tweaking etc. Put your time into getting it to run on XP instead. I believe there is a site that provides old copies of DX, but I will not link it because I don't know the site or used it. (Google will help). Just remember that the earlier versions is not as cross compatible as DX9,10 and 11. If possible, install the DX that is on the disk!