Monopoly Tycoon Revival

Make Monopoly Tycoon (2001, Deep Red Games / Infogrames) install and run on Windows 10 and 11.

The game installs fine on modern Windows and then crashes on startup — usually right after the studio logo, sometimes before anything appears. There are two separate causes, both fixable in about a minute. No patched executable, no compatibility mode. The soundtrack needs one small COM shim registered for your user account; everything else is a text file.

This repository contains no game content. You need your own copy of the game.

Quick fix, by hand

1. Let the game write to its own folder

The game stores settings, profiles and savegames next to mc.exe. Under C:\Program Files (x86) a standard user account cannot write there, so the game silently fails to save anything — including the settings that fix the crash.

Run once in an elevated PowerShell:

icacls "C:\Program Files (x86)\Infogrames\Monopoly Tycoon" /grant "$($env:USERNAME):(OI)(CI)M" /T

2. Create config.cfg

In the game folder, create a file named config.cfg:

SysSetup api D3D
SysSetup device 1
SysSetup width 640
SysSetup height 480
SysSetup bitdepth 32
SysSetup texbitdepth 16
SysSetup music 1

device is the display adapter index and is specific to your machine. Use 0 if your primary display is a normal landscape monitor. Use 1 (or higher) if your primary display is rotated to portrait, or does not offer a 640×480 mode. The tool below works this out for you.

music 1 means music off. That is the safe setting without the shim described under Music; the game runs, silently.

That is the whole fix. Launch mc.exe.

Working it out automatically

Requires Python 3.12 or newer. Standard library only.

py -m pip install mtrevival        # or: pipx install mtrevival
mtrevival adapters                 # list adapters, show which support 640x480
mtrevival check                    # show what would be written, change nothing
mtrevival fix                      # write config.cfg, backing up any existing one

mtrevival fix --resolution 1920x1080             # any mode the adapter lists
mtrevival fix --resolution 1280x720 --windowed   # windowed needs patch 1.2
mtrevival fix --music                            # restore the soundtrack

py -m mtrevival … works too. From a git checkout use py -m pip install .; the music shim then needs building (see CONTRIBUTING.md) or the DLL from a release.

Example on a machine with a portrait primary display:

source: D3DEnum.txt
  adapter 0  NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080   modes=46   no 640x480  [portrait]
  adapter 1  NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080   modes=54   OK 640x480

fix never overwrites an existing config.cfg without copying it to a timestamped .bak first.

Music

The game plays its WMA soundtrack through a DirectShow filter that Windows dropped years ago. fix --music copies wmsource-shim.dll (built from tools/wmsource-shim, source included) next to mc.exe, registers it for your user only — no elevation, nothing outside your profile — and writes music 0. The shim hands the game Windows' own WM ASF Reader with the two adaptations the game needs. Details, evidence and removal in docs/music.md.

Do not run the game "as administrator" with music on: an elevated process cannot see per-user COM registrations. fix --music warns if that flag is set.

What actually goes wrong

Both crashes are the same defect: the game creates an object, never checks whether creation succeeded, and then dereferences the null pointer.

Crash 1 — access violation at mc.exe+0x000E792E

Windows logs exception 0xC0000005, fault offset 0x000E792E, faulting module mc.exe. The instruction is:

004E78FE  call dword ptr [edx+0x3C]   ; IDirect3D8::CreateDevice  (vtable slot 15)
004E7901  mov  eax, [ebp+0x44]        ; ...continues without checking the HRESULT
004E792E  mov  ecx, [eax]             ; <-- faults, EAX = 0
004E7932  call dword ptr [ecx+0xA0]   ; IDirect3DDevice8::SetViewport (slot 40)

The game requests 640×480 exclusive fullscreen on adapter 0. Recovered D3DPRESENT_PARAMETERS from a crash dump:

For exclusive fullscreen, Direct3D 8 requires the width, height and format to match an enumerated display mode. If your primary display is rotated to portrait, its mode list contains 480 X 640 and no 640 X 480. CreateDevice fails, and the unchecked null device is dereferenced by SetViewport.

The game writes its own evidence to D3DEnum.txt in the install folder. Look for an adapter whose modes are all taller than they are wide — that is the culprit.

Fix: point SysSetup device at an adapter that offers 640×480.

Crash 2 — access violation at mc.exe+0x000A801B

004A8007  call dword ptr [0x96E4E8]   ; MultiByteToWideChar -> filename
004A800D  mov  eax, [ebx+0x2CE8]      ; media interface -> NULL
004A801B  mov  edx, [eax]             ; <-- faults, EAX = 0
004A801E  call dword ptr [edx+0xC]

The filename recovered from the dump is gamedata\sound\music\music_intro.wma. The game builds a DirectShow graph to play its WMA soundtrack and asks for the 2001 Windows Media DirectShow source filter by CLSID. Windows 11 keeps only a 5 KB stub of dxmasf.dll and no longer registers the class, so CoCreateInstance fails. quartz.dll and devenum.dll load; the Windows Media source does not. The interface comes back null and is used anyway.

Fix: SysSetup music 1 suppresses that path, and the game runs without its music. fix --music restores it: the filter the game asks for, {6B6D0800-…}, is answered by a shim that wraps Windows' WM ASF Reader, creating a fresh reader per track (the reader refuses a second Load) and mapping the game's FindPin(L"Stream 1") onto the reader's Raw Audio 0. The 2001 Windows Media redistributable on the CD is not touched. See docs/music.md.

Compatibility notes

• Tested on Windows 11 Pro (build 26200), NVIDIA RTX 4080, English CD. Verified with game version 1.0 and again after applying the official patch 1.2 — the same config.cfg works for both. Verified on one machine only.
• Patch 1.2 applies cleanly on Windows 11 when run elevated. It changes mc.exe, three Lua scripts and the string tables, and leaves config.cfg alone. Both crashes above are still present in the 1.2 executable. Details in docs/patch-1.2.md.
• Resolution is free. SysSetup width / height accept any mode the chosen adapter enumerates; 1920×1080 exclusive fullscreen and 1280×720 windowed (SysSetup Window 1, patch 1.2 only) were verified running with a sane UI. The 1.0 key windowed is ignored; 1.2 renamed it.
• Music was verified on patch 1.2 (intro track by ear, all ten tracks and repeated track changes in a DirectShow harness). It needs Windows Media, which N editions get from the Media Feature Pack.
• Patch 1.2 drops an empty MTS.txt in the game folder while it runs and removes it on exit. If the game is killed, delete that file, or the next launch offers Safe Mode and overwrites config.cfg.
• GameSpy multiplayer is dead and out of scope.

Modding

The game is unusually open for its age, and this is the reason the project exists. All verified:

• 200 plain-text Lua scripts in scripts\, across 56 namespaces — DEFAULT, MAPS, SCENARIO1–SCENARIO20, TUTORIAL1–TUTORIAL12, NET0–NET8. Economy tuning lives in businesssettings.lua, blocksettings.lua and commoditysettings.lua.
• Saves are Lua too. profiles\<name>\settings.lua contains g_ProfileOptions.BoardName = "gb", which selects among 19 national boards shipped on the disc (usa, f, ger, aus, swe, and more).
• parameters\*.prm holds per-decade tuning, plus aiparameter.prm and consumer.prm.
• The shipped executable still contains debug flags (AIDEBUG, DEBUGTEXT, SHOWALLCARS, CHEATINGGIT) and remnants of the developers' block and building editors.

See docs/phase-0-findings.md for the full investigation, and docs/superpowers/specs/ for the project design.

Licence

MIT — see LICENSE. This covers the tools and documentation in this repository only. Monopoly Tycoon itself is the property of its rights holders and is not distributed here.