Genre: Childrens, Platform
Release Year: 2003
Developer: BAM! Entertainment
Publisher: Acclaim
Age Rating: Everyone
Playability Status: Playable (with significant issues)
Tested On: Windows 10 x64, Windows 7 x64, Windows XP
Availability: Copyright retained - Out of print/unavailable
Cheese loving plasticine pals Wallace and his dog Gromit star in this polished and well presented platform adventure game. While visiting their local Zoo, the pair stumble into a plot by that notorious gremlin penguin Feathers McGraw, who is busy capturing the other animals in the zoo and using them as slave labour.
Installation
The game should install just fine on a modern PC. Simply place the disc into your computers optical drive and follow the on-screen prompts. If the autorun program does not start automatically, browse to the CD in Computer/This PC and run the “InstallZoo.exe” program manually.
We could find no evidence of any patches or updates having been released for the game, so once you’re done installing you’re ready to play.
Playing the game
We were only partially successful getting this title to run on a more modern PC.
Windows 10 – Under Windows 10 the game would not start at all, simply locking up whenever we tried to start it.
Windows 7 – Under Windows 7 the game would start, but where an in-game video was supposed to play, we heard only audio. This includes the games intro and the various animated cut-scenes as you progress through the game. We imagine Wallace & Gromit fans would want to watch these scenes while making their way through the game.
Windows XP Virtual Machine – The game worked well when using a Windows XP virtual machine and VMWare Workstation 12 Player. If you need help setting up VMWare Player, see this tutorial.
Windows XP (Native) – If your PC can still boot into Windows XP, Wallace & Gromit in Project Zoo should work just fine for you under this old OS.
Tweaking visual settings
There are only a handful of visual quality settings for the game. Start the game from the Start menu or screen and choose “Screen & Graphics”. The window shown below will then appear.
The important settings are “Resolution” and “Colour Depth”. Resolution should normally be set to your monitors native resolution. Usually you can simply move the slider all the way to the right to accomplish this.
Colour Depth should always be set to 32 bit. You should also make sure that “Enable Hardware Acceleration” is on. This should be supported in VMWare Player. Shadows and Heat Haze effects can also be left on.
If you’re running the game in a Windows XP virtual machine, you might find the configuration utility crashes, or doesn’t let you set the correct screen mode. If that’s the case, navigate to the following folder:-
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\ProjectZoo
In this folder you will find a file called Options.txt. If you open this file in Notepad, or your favourite text editor, you will be able to manually edit the games screen resolution settings by changing the ScreenSize and ScreenHeight lines. Don’t forget to set “Widescreen:1” if you’re running a widescreen screen mode. Save the changes when you’re done and launch the game again. If you’re not familiar with editing text files, see this tutorial.
Configuring controllers
The game has full support for game controllers. To configure the bindings, start the game and choose “Keys and Controller”. The window shown below will then appear.
To fully enable the Xbox 360 controller, what you need to do is select “Enable Camera Axes”. Then simply bind the right control stick to the pan/tilt controls. Unfortunately there is no way to invert the axis if they are not to your liking.
Finally, make sure you bind “Menu select” to the controllers Start button and “Menu Back” to the back button. The game is now perfectly playable, however you cannot skip the cut scenes without getting up to press the Escape key. If you have a copy of Xpadder, you might want to bind the Escape key to the controllers back button just for convenience.
Change any other bindings according to taste and then click “OK” when you are done. You’re now fully configured and ready to take on Feathers McGraw.
Can you submit a fix?
Know how to get this game fully working in Windows 7 or Windows 10? Help the community by submitting a comment and letting us know.
Screenshots
Click on any screenshot to enlarge it.
I found a solution for the video not working on my end on Windows 7 64-bit, not sure which did the trick but on the Zoo_SSE.exe I ticked disable desktop composition, visual themes, and set the compatibility to Windows XP (Service Pack 2) and the intro cutscene worked with no issues. Well, the intro with Wallace and Gromit talking anyways.
This game does work in Windows 10, you need to add it to your registry and set Zoo_SSE to Windows 8 compatibility mode and run as administrator
Add what to the registry exactly?
The game directory, it doesn’t seem to work now and I don’t know why, I got it to work in Win95 and 98 mode but the game would crash as soon as you start to play as Gromit
Does anyone know where I can buy an English version of the game/English audio files?
I’ve installed mine again as I never finished playing it as a kid (I got stuck somewhere) and found that it’s in German! Not that weird since I do live in a German speaking country but still, I can’t quite believe I would have played it in German back then. Maybe also a reason why I never finished it.
Anyways, I’ve been looking on the disc and the installation directory and can’t find any language files other than German. There is a config file “options” that lists “Language” but that file seems to be inoperative anyways. Changing the resolution in the launcher doesn’t change it in that file.
Ebay and amazon both don’t like one single PC copy. :(
Cheers,
Topsy
Got my version working by using dgvoodoo2 as a wrapper on windows 10 and it is very smooth, the Cutscences are a bit choppy.
Nice, DGVoodoo2 is always improving so it may be that many games we test could do with revisiting.
Hey, Just a Heads up managed to get it working more stable by using the glide dll from nGlide and copied and pasted them into the directory and set the setting to work in dgvoodoo2.
This is a DirectX game so that won’t make any difference I’m afraid.
“Unfortunately there is no way to invert the axis if they are not to your liking.”
I actually find a way to invert camera. Use xinput plus and set section “directinput” like i did. https://i.imgur.com/ft83PKJ.png
You can also further improve visuals by forcing AA (https://i.imgur.com/PrS0KVK.png its only 8xaa with 1440p) and AFx16 (https://i.imgur.com/VjWyHzs.png) in control panel and improve fluidity (stable 60 instead variability and tearing) by force adaptive vsync also in control panel
Before https://i.imgur.com/Iyagd0Q.png
After https://i.imgur.com/xrsrHV6.png
you used which software for graphics quality please and do you know how to use that mouse on W&G?
sorry my english and no one so sorry for the mistakes if there are any
I followed the instruction to create the VM and installed the game but I get the error “No disk inserted.” What did I do wrong?
I am having trouble getting the controls to work, the game start up fine but if won’t implement and keyboard bindings I have allocated myself.
Hey, I’m having the same issue! did you ever manage to fix this??
when I changed controls it doesn’t work and the game did not open
Ok so follow this steps if u got an NVidia card and got windows 10 pro
(this might also work with amd or intel hd graphics not sure)
Guide #1
1. Install game
2. Open RTSS
3. Add the game.exe to RTSS
4.Enable frame limiter to 60 or in some cases monitors refresh rate
(Why not enable frame limiter on nvidia control panel? Go ahead, it might
work it didn’t for me tho, if it does for u however, also enable vsync to avoid
screen tearing)
5. Open launcher, config and then launch game(As it should open by default)
6.Add the game to nvidia control panel and enable some graphics enhancements(Optional)
Guide #2
1.Install game
2.add game to nvidia control panel
3.Set max pre rendered frames to 1 or low latency mode to on
4.Enable vsync(Some systems need this)
5.Open launcher, config and then launch game
Strangely i didnt have to enable vsync, i got no tearing whatsoever, however frames
seemed slow which is why i had to use RTSS to get smooth frames …also i dont own
a fancy gsync or freesync monitor.
Try both regardless of the OS version u got(must be windows tho lols), if none of this helped try dgvoodoo.
Anyone getting sound popping issues? if u know how to fix this pls let us know thx :v