 Why is Vista different? 
Background information on the issue |
Firstly, allow me to explain why Vista has some initial compatibility issues with Mirage Realms on some machines. MR is programmed in quite an old but respected language called Visual Basic 6, an exclusive Microsoft language designed to make creating applications easy for the masses and get developers working on Windows-orientated programs.
VB6 has been a massive success, and up until the introduction of the .net framework and full object orientation in the latest instalment of Visual Basic, it was one of the biggest employment opportunities in the UK for programmers.
Now, Microsoft have attempted to get programmers to stop using Visual Basic 6 and migrate to other languages and later versions - fortunately for us people have fought this. Initially, Windows Vista was going to have no support for it (meaning in no uncertain terms the end of Mirage Realms), but developers from across the world complained and alas legacy support was integrated. This legacy support on Vista is enough to run many apps, and for the most part developers can just include their own .dll's and .ocx files if the clients so require it (see our trouble shooting page, for instance).
Unfortunately Vista comes with DirectX10 pre-installed, and again unfortunately for us DX10 does not only fail include the DirectX7 Visual Basic runtime files, but Vista makes it overly difficult to register them. Never fear, for we have foreseen this coming and have found a way around the annoyance that is Vista.
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The Fix!
Resolving the ActiveX Object issue |
Firstly please ensure you have followed the steps explained on our other troubleshooting pages as it could be related to a .ocx issue (thus much easier to fix), if however you are specifically getting an error message related to an ActiveX Object and you are running windows vista, you will need to download the Visual Basic 6 DirectX7 .dll file first.
Download dx7vb.dll for Vista
Once you have downloaded this file, place it on your desktop and navigate to your start bar as shown below. Instead of going to the run prompt, type CMD in the search box.
Now, right click on CMD and choose "Run as Administrator" - for some reason even if you have full administrative privileges and even if you have UAC disabled, Vista will not allow you to use the command prompt to register environment variables, services, dll's or ocx files if you do not specifically run your application in this way.
Now we need to navigate to this .dll file and register it with Vista. Since we are now running cmd.exe with administrative privileges we should have free-reign over the operating system. Once you are prompted, type the following (replace the username "lstewart" with your own windows username):
Press enter and you should be informed that the .dll was registered successfully. Take a deep breath and run Mirage Realms, it should now work! If you have any further Vista-Specific issues, or questions related to this procedure - please raise them on the forums.
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