I ran into a problem recently when trying to play some of my old games on my new Vista PC. Luckily, I was able to find a fantastic solution which I thought I would pass along to you guys.

The game is Medal of Honor Allied Assault (MOHAA). The problem was not with the main game, which worked fine. The problem was with the two expansion packs that were sold and manufactured afterwards, Breakthrough and Spearhead. For some reason there was a problem with the way the code was written on these two expansion pack games. They would not run correctly in Vista with a new video card. There were actually two problems, the new video cards couldn’t handle the old code without a forced command line, and there were not any old video drivers that worked with the new OS – Vista. In addition Vista required you to run the game as an administrator, which was not the normally accepted instance when running the game under normal circumstances.

To correct the problem I found a program called Nhancer. The program runs with Nvidia but is not an Nvidia application. The program is essentially an interface that streamlines the Nvidia controls that are available to all users, but tucked so far into the registry files and command files that any normal person would not have the technical skills to process the commands needed to make any corrections. Nhancer worked wonders, all you had to do was run the application, select the game that you wanted to force a code for, and enter the code. To my delight, MOHAA – Breakthrough and Spearhead, must have had so many problems that the code was already hard coded when I selected the games. So all I had to do was select my games, select allow changes, and then save the changes. After that the administrator portion was an easy fix. You do a right click on the icon for the game, and select “run as administrator”, and it worked fine, no problems. It is nice to know that there is software out there that works for the end users and further simplifies the already complex enough technology world. One would think that when you’re paying top dollar for a system they would work out all the problems for you before selling it to you. Instead we have to rely on people that offer freeware to fix the problems of “expensiveware”.