These are all Dos games, so run them in Dos, or in Dosbox.

The Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Nine-game Collector's Edition has a lot of problems getting installed and configured properly in order to work correctly. With the WizardWorks - AD&D Technical Support file and some additional advice, you should be able to get it working and playing properly. I have tested this with the first game of the series "Pool of Radiance" and it works great. I suggest you begin with that game, and once you have it saving games and characters and loading them again properly. Then you can take what you've learned and apply it to the other games in this series.

1. From Dos or Dosbox run Install.bat from the AD&D gold cdrom. Select and install Pool of Radiance. Once it finishes installing exit from the program.

2. Now check the installation directory and make sure it looks like this (taking into account which drive you actually installed it too)
C:\WIZWORX
C:\WIZWORX\POOLRAD
C:\WIZWORX\POOLRAD\SAVE
This is important since the game will only load and save saved game and character files from this directory structure.

3. Look on the AD&D gold disk and find the Poolhelp\cfg subdirectory. Find the file pool.cfg and copy it into your C:\WIZWORX\POOLRAD directory. This tells the game which graphics and sound to use, where the game is located and where to save and load games from. Each time you run the game it will ask you if you want to use the current configuration or a new one. Just hit enter to keep this one, if you select a new one it will write a non-working pool.cfg and you will need to recopy the original back to get your game working again. This is what it looks like.
E
P
C:\WIZWORX\POOLRAD\
C:\WIZWORX\POOLRAD\SAVE\
N

4. Ok now the game is installed and you should be able to create, save and load characters and saved games. From now on you will start the game (Pool of Radiance)
from the directory C:\WIZWORX\POOLRAD by running the start.bat file. Just type start then hit enter to run it. The game comes with a prebuilt party, if you want to load them up to play with or look around, just load save game A and you're ready to go.

5. All of the manuals and maps can be accessed from the install menu for each game. You can read and print them out. I am also including the manual, codewheel, and journal for Pool of Radiance, since I have them handy. My sincere thanks to the resources I got them from. I hope that they will not mind me including them in this package.

I've had this collection for several years and never could get them working in order
to be able to play them again. I really wanted to play these, so I started looking everywhere for some way to get them working. I finally found the WizardWorks - AD&D Technical Support file at http://web.archive.org/web/19990921040940/http://www.wizworks.com/wiztech/ad&dhelp.html
and with a little more tweaking I finally got Pools going again.

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