I’ve got a couple of old Windows games I’ve been trying to get to run lately, but to no avail. Unfortunately, both games are fairly obscure and there’s little to no information about them, so I’m unable to find much help or advice on getting them running.
The two games are Rex! Your Interactive Pet Dinosaur and Crayons Color and Paint Studio.
Here are my Dropbox links for both games, each zipped folder has the files that were on the CD, an ISO of those files, and a BIN and CUE made from the ISO file.
Crayons Color and Paint Studio
Rex! Your Interactive Pet Dinosaur
I’m not super knowledgeable about getting old games to run, so I haven’t been able to do much, but I wanted to document what I was able to try, just in case.
Also, both games are fairly old, so there’s a chance that something is wrong with the CDs that I’m not aware of.
I’ve also uploaded both games to archive.org:
Crayons Color & Paint Studio
REX! Your Interactive Pet Dinosaur
Here’s a rundown of what I’ve done that's relevant to both games.
For both games, I’ve tried PCem versions of both Windows 95 and Windows 98.
For Windows 95, I’ve used Windows 95 set up by someone else and I’ve also set it up myself.
With Windows 95 set up by somebody else, I used The Collection Chamber’s setups for Chaos Island: The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Disney’s Active Play: The Lion King 2: Simba’s Pride, as I also had both of those games and hoped that the setup was similar enough to my old computer. They didn’t work for Crayons or Rex, but there could’ve been something that I missed. (Collection Chamber does excellent work and has gotten quite a few of my old favorites working.)
For Windows 95 set up by me, I mainly used a tutorial done by theoligopolist at olistutorials, and when that didn’t work for Crayons or Rex, I also partially used leonardo’s Windows 95 setup guide at vogons, which also didn’t work for Crayons or Rex, either. (Both guides are very well done and include all the links and everything you need, however, Rex and Crayons both seem to be quite difficult and these setups didn’t work for either of them.)
Windows 98 was much easier, as someone on archive.org uploaded a fully put together version that’s ready to go. However, I also couldn’t get Crayons or Rex to work on it, either.
Rex! Your Interactive Pet Dinosaur
Problem: Rex appears to install, but when you try to run it, it says that it didn’t install properly and to install it again.
It’s been a long time, but I seem to remember that Rex was hard to get running, I think there’s only been one computer that we’ve had that it ever worked on. I believe that it worked on a Windows 98 computer that had been upgraded from Windows 95.
There’s not a lot out there about Rex, so here’s a few links that I was able to find:
The archive of the first version of Expert Software’s Rex page
The archive of the second version of Expert Software’s Rex page
VirtualPet.com’s summary of the unofficial Rex website
A brief article on GameSpot about Rex coming out
NeverDieMedia’s shop listing that tells more about Rex
Spooky799kil’s YouTube video of Rex working in an emulator
Good news! I installed Rex in order to get the error message for when I posted it to archive.org, and for some reason, the game started working!
The only thing I did differently was install Crayons to double check that it was still locking up on the menu, then uninstalled it. After that, I installed Rex and it worked!
The virtual machine that it works on is The Collection Chamber’s Disney’s Active Play: The Lion King 2: Simba’s Pride, which is running PCem.
Crayons Color and Paint Studio
Problem: Crayons installs just fine, but when you go to pick between the coloring book or the paint program, the program hangs up and freezes, locking up the entire emulator.
"- If you are using this program in Windows 3.1, you must have a printer attached and a printer driver installed. If you do not, you may receive an error message that will than lock you out of the program."
I haven’t tried to install it in Windows 3.1, but since the game locked up on both Windows 95 and Windows 98, I thought that maybe the lack of a printer was the problem, so that’s the route I took for trying to get it to work. (I haven’t gotten an error message, though, just the program freezing up.)
I looked for a virtual printer, and landed on Doro PDF Writer. There’s some others out there, but they required more steps, so I decided to try the easy one first.
I kept running into a problem with getting it to install on Windows 95 (I had a missing file that was being very stubborn about being fixed), so I pivoted to Windows 98 and it installed nicely. However, this didn’t fix the problem, and Crayons keeps locking up.
I believe that Crayons worked on a Windows 98 computer that was upgraded from Windows 95 and I think that I was able to get it installed on a Windows XP computer later.
There’s even less information about Crayons then Rex out there, there’s been a couple of Reddit threads of people trying to find the name of the program.
The archived version of Expert Software’s page on Crayons is bafflingly wrong, only mentioning the coloring book part and also a screensaver that doesn’t seem to come with the version of the program I have
geogeo222 posted the soundtrack to Crayons on YouTube
KHInsider uploaded the soundtrack to their website and opened up a forum thread for it
Thanks for reading all of this! I hope that one day these programs will be playable again. If anybody has any luck or advice for getting them running, I’d love to hear about it! Thanks!
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