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Resident Evil 2


Genre: Survival Horror
Release Year: 1999
Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Capcom
Age Rating: 18+
Playability Status: Playable (with significant issues)
Tested On: Windows 8 x64
Availability: Copyright retained - Out of print/unavailable

The residents of Raccoon City were an unfortunate bunch. When your neighbours like to make zombies in secret labs, it’s only a matter of time before something bad happens. This time the zombies aren’t content with wondering around a mansion and instead have decided to come munch on the entire population of the city. As either rookie cop Leon or tough girl Claire, you will need to battle zombies and solve puzzles in order to stay alive and escape the city before it’s too late.

Installation

While the game can run directly from either of the CDs, we recommend that you install it for best performance. Unfortunately, the configuration and installation utility that comes with the game is somewhat buggy and will fail to install on more modern versions of Windows. As a workaround for this problem, we’ve created a replacement installer that will install the whole game to your hard drive and also install the 1.4 patch. You can download the installer here (link broken? Let me know here). Note that this is NOT a copy of the game, you still require your original CDs in order to install the game. We do NOT provide links to copyright software and such things are not allowed in the comments either.

Patching

The 1.4 patch for the game adds a new graphics driver to the driver selection screen and automatically unlocks the extreme battle mode together with Ada and Chris as playable characters. You can download it here. If you installed the game with our replacement installer you do not need this patch as it is already installed.

Running the game

When you have the 1.4 patch installed, you should use only the “calire.bat” and “Leon.bat” files to launch the game. Only use the games launcher (the menu that appears when you insert the CD or run “Configure Resident Evil 2” from the Start menu/screen) to make configuration changes. If you installed using our installer, you can click either “Play Resident Evil 2 (Leon)” or “Play Resident Evil 2 (Claire)” to start the game. You should however, run the configuration tool at least once before you try to start either Leon or Claire’s game.

The very first time you run the games launcher, it will offer to install Intel Indeo and Directx. The versions included on the CD are of course, completely obsolete so you should skip this step.

Resident Evil 2 is an extremely problematic game and may have issues even when running on a Windows XP machine. We’ve tried to collect every suggested workaround from the various websites into this guide, but even with all the suggested workarounds we still had issues when it came to saving and loading games.

Compatibility modes – Most guides recommend setting the compatibility mode for the games executables to Windows 95 and allowing the game to run as administrator. To do this correctly, install the game using our installer, then open the games installation directory (C:\Games\ResidentEvil2 by default). Find the files “ClaireU.exe”, “LeonU.exe” and “ResidentEvil2.exe” and change them all to run in compatibility mode for Windows 95 and to run as administrator. It’s particularly important to run the “ResidentEvil2.exe” file as an administrator otherwise it won’t be able to save its settings to the registry.

Choosing a Graphics Card and setting visual quality – From the games launcher/configuration file, click on the second option from the top. A menu like the one shown below will then appear:-

 

resident-evil-2-gfx-menu

 

At the top of the window under “Device Setup” you can choose from a bunch of old graphics cards. Since its unlikely any modern PC will actually be still using these cards, you may need to try each one before you find one that works well with your setup. Usually the “Voodoo Rush” and “Voodoo Banshee” options work best on modern PCs.

At the bottom of the screen you can see an option for “Screen Resolution”. Resident Evil 2 supports two screen modes, 320×240 and 640×480. You might logically assume that you should run the game in 640×480 mode, but if you do this on many machines, the game will run in a tiny window rather than full screen. Choose 320×240 16 bit colour FullScreen for best results. Always run the game in full screen mode to avoid bugs and glitches.

Under the “Features” tab you can set various quality settings. Generally you can turn on all the options here and run the game in the highest quality settings. The games configuration tool gives you the option to skip movies, but we recommend that you do not as this can cause glitches at certain parts of the game. Movies can easily be skipped by pressing the space bar or the action button/key anyway.

Finally, if you are lucky to have two graphics cards in your PC, make sure SLI or Crossfire is disabled for Resident Evil 2.

Game speed issues – If the game runs at the wrong speed, one workaround that has been suggested on other sites is to load Windows Media Player and simply set it to loop any video file. You can then mute media player and leave it playing in the background. We didn’t need to do this on our Windows 8 machine however.

Save/load issues – To save in Resident Evil 2 you need to find a typewriter and have an ink ribbon in your inventory. The first typewriter is in the lobby of the police station, you will need to play for about 10 minutes before you encounter it. We recommend testing that saving and loading is working at your earliest opportunity. The games save/load system is very unreliable. If you installed the game using our replacement installer, your save game directory will be set to C:\RESIDENTEVIL2

If you find you cannot save or load games, try the following:-

Change the save game directory to the root of your C: drive instead.

Format a USB storage device of 4gb or less as a FAT32 volume, then change your save game directory to use this device instead.

If you cannot change the save game directory through the games launcher, you can do so by manually editing the registry. Run the registry editor tool (regedit) as an administrator and browse to the following key:-

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\CAPCOM\RESIDENT EVIL2 (if you have a 32 bit version of Windows).

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\CAPCOM\RESIDENT EVIL2 (if you have a 64 bit version of Windows).

Under this key there is a string called “Save Path”. Change this to your desired location. Remember, it must have a trailing ‘\’, for instance “C:\RESIDENTEVIL2\” is correct where “C:\RESIDENTEVIL2” will cause the game to crash. If you need help using the registry editor, see this tutorial.

Despite trying all the above workarounds, we were not able to get save games working correctly on our Windows 8 machine.

Configuring controls

The clumsy controls of the old Resident Evil games certainly help to increase the tension at points, but not necessarily in the right way! While the game does have some support for controllers, it’s far easier to simply use Xpadder to configure your gamepad. Below is a picture of the Xpadder profile we created to use with the Xbox 360 controller.

 

resident-evil-2-xpadder

 

The controls are based on the Playstation 1 original. You can use the analogue stick or the D-pad to move your character. The back button (Control) sets options. The right analogue trigger (X) draws your current weapon. The A button (C) will fire your weapon or perform an action. The X button (V) will make your character run (use this a lot). The B button (Z) will open the inventory window while the Y button (A) will open a map, where available.

Remember that if you run Resident Evil 2 as an administrator, you will also need to run Xpadder as administrator too, otherwise your gamepad mappings simply won’t work.

Biohazard 2 Sourcenext and other ways to play

Playing Resident Evil 2 on the PC can be quite a frustrating experience. We must have made the initial trip to the police station with Leon about a dozen times when trying the various workarounds for the save/load bug. If you can’t get the game running, there are several other options:-

The original Playstation 1 version – If you don’t have a console handy, you can run this version on the various Playstation emulators

Ports to other consoles – The game was also ported to the Nintendo 64, Dreamcast and Gamecube consoles. Again, emulators exist for these platforms too if you don’t have the required hardware.

Biohazard 2 Sourcenext – There was an enhanced PC port of the game released in Japan under the name Biohazard 2 (Sourcenext Selection). This version fixes many of the bugs and includes graphical enhancements and better support for modern PCs. It’s difficult to find since it was only released in Japan, but if you can find it and you can track down the fan-made English language patch, this is the best PC version of Resident Evil 2.

References

Thanks to the following two guides for their suggestions and workarounds for the games many issues:-

Resident Evil 2 PC-Version FAQ
Running Resident Evil 2 Platinum on Windows 7 64 Bit – Neoseeker Forums

45 comments

  1. latino says:

    thank you for the guide.i’ve installed this game with your installer in win xp sp3.i need to clarify that it doesn´t necessary put the claire.exe and leon.exe executables in win 95 compatibility mode,only the residentevil.exe executable,because the game crashes.
    i´m interested in some patch to put subtitles to spanish (my languaje) to the game,if you know something about it…

  2. Jelqmastur says:

    I got a “failed to initialize directx” error when I was seeing if it could run. Any ideas or fixes?

    • Annoyed says:

      Had the same problem on my netbook with Intel GMA 3600. Downloaded a patch for the sourcenext version (Bio2.exe – less than a MB) and ran that. Next time I ran the Resident Evil 2 config and hit “detect” it let me choose “software” which solved the problem and let the game run.

      • Annoyed says:

        I didn’t expect it to work. It is also still in English although there appear to be a few Japanese characters here and there that I don’t think were there originally.

      • Annoyed says:

        What I’m saying is that this sourcenext patch seemed to work with the American release, although I did not expect it to.

  3. Brian says:

    Just get the Sourcenext version. The subtitles are Japanese, but the game runs perfectly.

  4. Erick says:

    I’ve just tested DGVoodoo2, a wrapper for Glide and DirectX 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7. The game now runs just great and without the anoying “Hardware cannot initialize” message, even without patching. Game works great but the videos are black. I hope someone suggests something.

    • BuckoA51 says:

      Nice, if that wrapper gets any better I could just close this site down and just put a “use DGvoodoo2” notice in its place :) Did you try to save the game though? I doubt dgVoodoo helps there.

  5. Dave says:

    any chance to reup the installer

  6. jake says:

    it says insert disc when install starts

  7. Ale says:

    Couldn’t install using your installer because the cd drive wasn’t under D: letter, changed the letter to D: and it does the same thing, can’t find the cd. But it’s there! Tried with both CDs.

  8. glen says:

    how do i get cd m8

  9. Annoyed says:

    Says “unable to write to registry”. Can’t play the game. Can’t install the game.

    It is set to administrator mode and windows 95 under compatibility.

    Your installer does not install any registration entries.

  10. Annoyed says:

    Anti-virus was blocking the registry. Disabled and installed fine.

  11. GeneralComa says:

    Your installer keeps telling me to insert the Leon CD when I already have it inserted. Any idea how to fix this?

  12. Matthew says:

    Works great for me

  13. Evan says:

    you need the CDs to install using this installer??

  14. Lurka says:

    So everything works except I cant see the CG cut-scenes, I can see the ingame cut scene but yeah not the ones were it has different graphics

  15. God says:

    whats the point in this web page if u have to buy the disc

  16. Kwijibo says:

    I inserted the Leon disc on my PC (Unit E:) but the installer says that can´t find Leon CD Any solutions??

  17. Goji says:

    Music doesn’t play for me, but everything else seems to work fine. Any idea on what the problem may be?

  18. threedz says:

    the installer doesn’t work on eu versions .-.

  19. Jewinja says:

    I know I probably get a responses, but the CG movies won’t show up for me at all. I get sound but no video, and I was wondering if anyone else has the same problem and has found how to fix it.

  20. leon says:

    the CG cut scene does not work for some reason any idea why?

  21. fei says:

    how can i place the LeonU.exe or ClaireU.exe on a disk? i keep try to do it but it just cant be placed in a disk

  22. nickgames8 says:

    I can’t get it to work. I have an odd version of the game from a set of games called the VICIOUS box set and it doesn’t detect my Leon disc when I insert it. Any fixes? The disc is called “RES2 LEON”

  23. Dave says:

    I just used voodoo wrapper. Works flawless . Fixes the black cutscene

  24. Dave says:

    Also wanted to add. By using voodoo u can run the game at the 640×480 full screen for way better graphics. Then go into voodoo and change the aspect ratio so it’s displayed at 4:3

    • BuckoA51 says:

      Which wrapper exactly? There are several.

      • Dave says:

        It’s called dgVoodoo 2.73. There’s a link for it on this site. Idk if it’s still active. If you look up star wars Force Commander on the site here you’ll find the link in the comments. Guide there how it works. Follow the same guide for re2. Set the voodoo to “full screen” then “stretched, keep Aspect Ratio” on the drop down. Open up the re2 cd-rom and set the resolution to the 640×480 16 bit full screen option. Then fire it up using the shortcuts provided in the custom installer found on this site. You’ll get crisp picture , game saved fine, all the videos and cutscenes are present. You can mess with some of the settings in voodoo if u want. I have 16 bit buffer checked , force vSync. Etc etc.

  25. Dave says:

    There’s one more thing I forgot to add. On my pc to get the FMVs to play. I had to change the compatibility to windows XP (service pack 2). The LeonU , ClaireU and the residentevil2 files. Hope this helps anyone

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