PSA why many classic games may recently won't work for you on Win 7 and vista and how to fix this

[unknownhero]

I tried playing vice city today on my pc and it wouldn't launch. I tried the usual troubleshooting pointers but none of them worked out. I did some digging and apparently microsoft shut down servers for game explorer hich is causing games like gta 3, vice city, or any game launched between 1998 and 2006 from working. however, there is a fix posted by a user on reddit who goes into depth regarding this:

tl;dr: Games Explorer in Windows 7 and Vista is preventing older PC games from launching. This can be fixed by modifying the Windows registry to prevent Games Explorer from trying to contact Microsoft's servers.

In the last few weeks, Microsoft shut down servers related to the Games Explorer feature in Windows 7 and Vista (possibly related to the end-of-life announcement for the integrated Internet Games service). As a result, there are a ton of older PC games that will not run anymore on those operating systems.
When you launch one of these games, the gameux.dll file in the System32 or SysWOW64 directory tries to contact Microsoft's servers in order to update the game's profile in Games Explorer. The game will not start until the profile update is complete. Since the relevant servers are offline now, the update will never happen.
This problem affects hundreds of popular games. In my testing I have found titles that were released from 1998 through 2006.

Option #1 (recommended)
The best solution I know of is to modify the Windows registry so that Games Explorer points to a loopback address - meaning your own computer - instead of Microsoft's servers. I found this solution on GOG's troubleshooting page, who grabbed it from a user in their forums.
Here are the steps to take:

• Open the Registry Editor. You can find it by searching for "Registry Editor" (without quotes) in the Start Menu.
• In the left side of the Registry Editor, navigate to the following folder:
  HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\GameUX\ServiceLocation
• Create a backup by right-clicking the ServiceLocation folder and selecting Export.
  Give it a name like "Games Explorer backup" (without quotes) and save is somewhere on your hard drive, in case you need to undo the changes.
• Now in the right side of the Registry Editor, right-click Games and select Modify.
• In the Value Data box, delete the current entry and replace it with 127.0.0.1
• Then click OK and close the Registry Editor.

Option #2
If Option #1 doesn't work or you'd rather not modify the Windows registry, you can simply disable both of the gameux.dll files instead.
The gameux.dll files are only used for Games Explorer, so disabling them is completely safe. Someone created a batch file in 2012 that will do this easily, and it is reversible by running the file again.
There is at least one game - the original version of BioShock - that won't run if gameux.dll is disabled, so re-enabling the files may be necessary.
I did not find any other other games with this requirement after spending a few hours testing and searching the internet, but if you happen to come across any, please leave a comment to let me know (launching the game should give you an error message that says "Failed to create the GameExplorer object" or something similar).
This is the blog post that has the needed file (download link is about 2/3 of the way down).
Mirror (Google Drive)

• Extract GameUxFixed-Ubeogesh.bat from the archive to a temporary folder.
• Run it, then press any key to apply the patch. If you get an error message about not having ownership privileges, run it again by right-clicking and selecting "Run as administrator."
• You might need to restart your computer for the changes to take effect.
• Run the .bat file again to undo the changes, if necessary.

I originally learned about this problem through this thread on GOG, which also points to a number of other sources with more details. This post on superuser.com was particularly helpful for me, and I also learned that this has been an issue with Windows since at least April 2010.

I figured I should post this in case anyone else has any problems similar to this.

 

[lashman]

awesome ... i'm sure at least a few people will find this useful

thanks for posting it!

 

[gabbo]

Interesting indeed. Haven't run into this with any of the games listed (a host of other issues with Max Payne 1 though - remedied in time.. pun not intended), but it could come in handy in the future.

 

[m_dorian]

Thanks for the tips. I ll have to fix my laptop's registry now just because MS are dicks.

 

[undu]

At this point for Windows retrogaming I'd recommend switching to Linux and use the Wine Compatibility layer through Steam (proton) or Lutris.

This is because Microsoft is going to abandon windows 7 very soon anyway.

 

[Aelphaeis Mangarae]

I was dealing with this issue a decade ago because my gaming PC didn't have internet access. IIRC I would boot the game, terminate rundll32, then boot the game again? Or something? It was so long ago. But it was exactly the kind of problem you get when a software company never bothers testing how their software works offline.

 

[Futaleufu]

Thanks for the heads up, I was going to reinstall Windows 7 on my Core 2 Duo PC, its good to know that extra steps will be required now.