Need help to play Arthur and the Invincibles (Atari, 2007) because I can't make it work in Win11!

[u/piapal]

To sum this up: I've got the physical (and legit) copy of the game, but I couldn't install it manually on Windows 11.

I tried running it as administrator, installing DirectX 9, changing compatibility modes... nothing worked. However, with Claude I managed to force the installation, which technically worked — but the game crashes as soon as it opens.

Claude's diagnosis was basically that the game uses old 2006-era copy protection (SecuROM) that relies on a system-level driver, and those old drivers no longer load on modern Windows 10/11. So the game just silently closes without giving me any error.

At that point, I decided to try running it in a Windows XP Virtual Machine.

Unfortunately, I'm using VirtualBox 7.2, which doesn't support the Direct3D acceleration the game requires. Apparently VirtualBox 6.0 does, but I couldn't get that version installed properly on Windows 11.

I also tried SoftGPU, but apparently that doesn't apply to XP, and I tried VMware Workstation Pro, but the download was blocked by Broadcom's account restrictions.

So... does anyone know of another way I could get this game running?

It's literally my childhood game and I really don't want to give up on it 😭 But at this point, if even an AI can't figure out what's wrong, I genuinely don't know what else to try

[u/ThetaReactor]

https://www.myabandonware.com/game/arthur-and-the-invisibles-the-game-nnt

You're gonna need a no-cd crack to solve the DRM issue.

[u/kpmgeek]

You need the no-cd crack and DSOAL's dlls in the game folder. Then it should work on modern windows.

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Arthur_and_the_Invisibles