So you certainly know that Windows no longer supports 16-bit programs because supporting legacy software is hell if you're an operating system developer and you care about security and also being profitable.
You might know about the otvdm software (a.k.a. winevdm) which lets you wrap windows 16-bit programs in a container very efficiently, enabling them to run quasi-natively. It's a wonderful program.
And there's a possibility that you know about Prince (rendered at the time in the installation and readme text as 0+>) Interactive, a piece of software for PC that was made by GrafxZone and uses a lot of embedded QuickTime videos to present what is, to put it a bit simplistically, Myst interpreted through the lens of Paisley Park. As you might guess from all of this, it's a 16-bit program, and thus doesn't run on modern Windows directly. But it's frustrating to get running in something like Dosbox because of its reliance on Windows libraries, and probably won't run very well inside of it. It can run inside a Windows VM, but those can be a pain to get running and tend to be laggy when it comes to games. Certainly a game of this nature isn't much worse for that sort of experience, but who wants all that added friction?
I've tried running the game in otvdm before and come up mostly frustrated and shrugging my shoulders. The installer, obviously, requires installing QuickTime (and it's not expecting a new version of it, either) to run. Every time I've installed it and QuickTime with the help of otvdm, and every time it gives me the error. But this time, oh, this time I paid attention to what I was doing during the installation and actually read what it has to say.
This was not an era of software development in which "best practices" for games reigned supreme. Sure, DOS interfaces for basic stuff like VGA graphics and, potentially, a sound card were pretty standardized (and, it should be noted, finicky even then), but the lack of OS overhead meant you could do fairly impressive things within it, stuff Windows wasn't in any way prepared to handle efficiently unless it ceded system control to the DOS games (which carries with it some fairly obvious risks in system stability). In a way, interactive media like this on early Windows felt like a miracle -- though it may have, uh, made a few deals with some technical devils to get where it did.
Anyway, reading through the installation process you notice there's a special popup that appears during the quicktime installation -- it's one that says to edit the autoexec.bat file. Specifically what it says it will do, if you look into it in more detail (or at least choose to edit manually), is that it will add the location of quicktime to the path. Well, no wonder it can't find quicktime if it's not part of the system path, and that's where it's trying to look for it! That's just one level removed from deleting a file from a folder and then trying to open it -- of course you can't find it, the software has no idea where to look!
On a modern system where losing a megabyte is about as significant as dropping a penny, a solution is straightforward -- simply copy the quicktime files from their installation directory into the working directory of the game. Now it can find them and the program should run correctly. And yes, the quicktime files are, in total, just over a megabyte together.
And so, with that done, you can load up PROGRAM.EXE (yes, seriously, that's what they called it, not even "INTERACTV" or something like the installation folder, just "PROGRAM") in otvdm and the game should be working.
By the way, the software uses an ini file to control where the files expected to be on the CD-ROM are actually located. This gets relocated by otvdm inside the windows folder from its own working directory, and you can edit it to whatever you want, so you don't actually need to run the game from the disc. Just copy the "MEDIA" folder from the CD and for SOURCEDIRECTORY, put the name of the folder you copied it into (so if you've got something like C:\INTERACTV\MEDIA for its location, the line should be "SOURCEDIRECTORY=C:\INTRACTV")
Truly Janelle Monae has bestowed her blessings upon us on this wonderful day.
Oh buddy, you know that is indeed the actual "load saved game?" starting menu for prince interactive. It could be nothing but.
