The Partners

How to Play

The game was tested on Windows 7 64-bit and Windows 10, it works fine. You may experience some small troubles when you play the game on modern systems, check our Notes for more details

Notes:

• If the installation doesn't start - try to run the installer in compatibility mode with old version of Windows (98, 2000 or XP) and as administrator
• It is recommended to install all versions of Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable and NET Framework for the correct work of the game. Also it is recommended to install K-Lite Codec Pack for the correct work of in-game videos
• The game works on DirectX 8, so if you're using Windows 8, 8.1, 10 or 11 - you need to enable DirectPlay: Go to Control Panel, and select 'Programs'. Select 'Turn Windows features on and off', click on 'Legacy Components' and check the box 'DirectPlay'. Select OK, once the installation is done, restart your computer
• The game didn't have any DRM-protection, only the simple disc check. If you want to play without the disc, use NoCD, simply replace the exe-file in game folder. NoCD for v1.0 showed some generic warnings, should be safe to use. But better to use NoCD for v1.4 or v1.8, they showed 0 warnings
• If you have the issues when the in-game text is not displaying correctly or not at all then do the following, do the next to fix it: go to The Partners/Data/Sim folder, open Param.ini in Notepad and change the line UseTextCache=1 to UseTextCache=0. Save the file and re-launch the game
• By default the game supports only 4:3 screen resolutions. It is possible to run the game in high screen resolutions by editing Start.ini file in The Partners/Data folder. Open it in Notepad and in mgFullScreenSize line enter the resolution you need. Unfortunately, UI elements don't scale to higher resolutions, so it will be small
• As alternative, we suggest to run the game through dgVoodoo 2, to use it copy the dll-files from the MS/x86 folder, dgVoodooCpl.exe and dgVoodoo.conf to the game folder, then run dgVoodoo Control Panel (dgVoodooCpl.exe) and enable the custom screen resolution. We also recommend to use dgVoodoo 2 if you have any graphical glitches in the game
• If you want to run the game in Windowed mode, edit Start.ini file in The Partners/Data folder, set mgFullScreen to 0