Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego? 1997

The 1997 point-n-click adventure in the Mohawk engine. Also known as Carmen Sandiego's Great Chase Through Time.

Play from HDD

This game is slightly a pain to get to play from the HDD, but it's doable. The whole 2 CD behemoth can be on YOUR local storage, and this even skips the CD swapping! Best part? Full install is a mere 630MB. Yeah, they probably could've fit the game on ONE CD if they left out the TV theme (an inclusion I love, admittedly) or used file compression. Oh well.

First, install the game normally. You need to do this to get the game's juicy executable, otherwise you won't be playing at all.

Next, copy the CASES, DATA, and MOVIES folders from each CD. Merge the folders from each CD together, so you have folders by those names with both CDs' contents in your game directory. Some files are on both CDs, they don't seem to differ meaningfully so use whichever you want. Also copy the SETUP folder from CD1 (yes, you need this) and TIME-ONE.CD from the first CD and TIME-TWO.CD from the second CD. Or since these files are both empty, just make empty files with those names.

Open up TIME32.CFG with your favourite text editor. (TIME16.CFG if you're using Windows 3.1.)

Change references to the CD root to references to your HDD. e.g. D and D: to C and C:. Change InstallFromDir from D:\SETUP to C:\(path to game)\SETUP. This will make the game think its install directory is also the CD.

Save the cfg and run the game. It should just work now. Have fun.

Possible bug: The game's intro cutscene might display in neon colours on first play. This however might just be a bug with the Nvidia drivers I installed. In any case, going back to the sign in screen and reloading seems to fix this.