I cant for the life of me get the game to work on my laptop. It can handle it spec wise, (so far as I know) but I figure vista is working against me. It does the video's fine then just dies, it wont go to the loading screens or the menus. Now, I know you're hardly a help desk, but as a once avid JK gamer, I figured if anyone could help, they'd be here. Any ideas?

Have you tried window mode?

Any way to access that setting without being able to go to ingame menus?

Alt+Tab out of it and then Alt+Tab back.

I cant, it tells me JK.exe has shut down unexpectedly, windows is searching for a soloution right after the very first cutscene following the Lucasarts logo.

For windowed mode you launch it as JK.exe -windowgui. I think that only the menus are in a window, though.

I couldn't get it to work in Vista without using -windowgui and enabling Advanced Display settings and turning on in-game windowed mode (which is only 8-bit color).

Eh? I'm running it fine on Vista Ultimate 64.

/Shrug

It's always worked fine for me. Make sure you have the latest JKUP patch from the hub.

Sorry, I'm completely useless when it comes to this, do I gotta do that in a msdos window?

Does Vista have compatibility modes like XP does? Try running it in Windows 95 mode if if does.

Right click the shortcut to JK.exe, go to properties and type -windowgui at the end of the 'target' line.

And if that doesn't work, try kyle's suggestion, and go along to the compatibility tab.

Edit: I'm assuming that Vista's interface is fairly similar to XP's.

Yes. I think in Windows you have to first go to the directory the .exe is in, so that's "cd (path to JK folder). Unless you or Vista did something weird during the install it's probably "cd Program Files/LucasArts/Jedi Knight" (if that's the correct path but it still doesn't go there, try adding quotes around the parts that contain spaces).

It sounds like at least one person has had to use the advanced configuration stuff, so that would be JK.exe -windogui -displayconfig (I think, anyway; jkhub.net has all the commandline parameters that are available).

EDIT: Archarjay's suggestion should work too. I didn't think of that.

Well, I've patched it with the latest unoffical patch, I've tried to access it through dosbox (vista doesnt have a msdos program as far as I know... also that didnt work) I've tried editing the shortcut, but alas, I get the error message "The name 'C:\Program Files\Lucas Arts\Jedi Knight\JK.EXE -windowgui' specified in the target box is not valid. Make sure the path and file name are correct."
I've also tried the compatability thing with both windows 95 and 98.

So, I'm begining to think I may be out of luck...

don't put the -windowgui part in quotes

Okay, tried it with the -windowgui outside the quote, it just kinda makes my screen flicker, then nothing happens, I checked the task manager to be sure.

Alright, I figured it out, I found a dos outlet on vista, JK works, but has some flickering issues with the outline of the window during play. I can deal with that though. Thanks for your help everyone.

I'm sure there must be some way to get it running perfectly. :/

There has been no DOS or MS-DOS in Windows since 98/ME. The proper term is Command Prompt. (For some reason this misnomer irks me.)

The distinction is important because subsequent Windows releases seem to more and more break DOS emulation. In XP sound support is mostly broken (required for gaming, there are various hacks around this), in Vista, console fullscreen support is gone, at least for nVidia cards (which is REQUIRED for DOS games since Windows hasn't allowed them to run in windowed since... never).

That's what Dosbox is for.
<3 Dosbox.

DOSBox itself is pretty good. Only problem is it's slow, because it is a cross-platform emulator. I've gotten the best performance and playability for DOS games from a virtual machine running MS-DOS 6.22.

Yeah, a VM with DOS 6.22 is awesome for old high performance stuff like Dark Forces.

Ah, so that's why there were always strange sound issues when playing Dark Forces on XP.

Thank you. That bugs that crap out of me too, but I feel like a know-it-all if I point it out.

http://bochs.sourceforge.net/

Try Bochs. You can download the Freedos Hard drive image along with it. It's easy to set up if you can follow directions.

I would recommend VirtualBox because it's free, rather powerful and has a nice UI.