Playing Ecstatica II on Modern Systems

This article is meant to help playing Ecstatica II on modern systems. Unlike the original game, Ecstatica II is both a native DOS and Windows application but the DOS version will inevitably crash when run through DOSBox while the Windows version can by default not be properly installed or run on Windows Vista and upwards. There are several ways to run Ecstatica II on modern systems, however.

Running Ecstatica II natively on Windows Vista/7/8/10

While Ecstatica II refuses to get installed or run on most modern Windows systems there exists a simple way to make it work. Just follow these simple steps:

1. Instead of installing the game, copy the CD's content into a folder on your hard drive. Better choose a simple directory such as C:\GAMES\ECS2 because it may be impossible to specify a more complicated one in the next step.
2. Open the file called "CDPATH" in the game's directory with an unformatted text editor such as Notepad or Notepad++ and enter the directory where you copied the game to.
3. Download this archive and extract its contents into your Ecstatica II directory.
4. Launch the game via E2WIN95.EXE.

The archive above contains a modified version of the game's executable which includes both the official patch (which fixes the game breaking "amazon bug" later on in the game) as well as MisterGrim's Vista patch. It also contains a change suggested by Wikipedia user Kram which makes the MIDI music work.

Additionally aqrit's DirectDraw wrapper is included which takes care of any performance issues (including audio stuttering) or graphical glitches.

Running Ecstatica II through DOSBox

As mentioned above, Ecstatica II can be played via DOSBox but suffers from heavily stuttering audio and will crash inevitably, rendering the game unbeatable. For information on how to set up DOSBox please to refer to the guide on running the original Ecstatica through DOSBox. The only major difference between playing both games on DOSBox is that Ecstatica II requires much more processing power so a cycles setting of 200,000 is recommended.