So my old computer crashed years ago, and only about last year did I get myself a new computer. However it originally didn't have a DVD drive, recently I bought myself and External DVD drive and installed a lot of my favorite classic games I still had. And while they installed successfully with no problem they won't actually play. I can get the game to open a 'launch menu', but when I actually try to start the game from there nothing happens. I tried running it in various compatibility modes to no avail.

And I am pretty sure that it's not a graphics card issue because the games I am trying to run are years old (like the F.E.A.R. Platinum Collection for example) and my computer runs newer games through Steam with much higher graphical demands (like the Witcher 2) no problem. It really seems like there is some communication problem between the computer itself and the External DVD, but only when I try launch the game, as it installed fine and also runs fine until you get to the launch menu.Might be antipiracy feature not playing well with external drive.

I'd suggest replacing the internal DVD ROM and the problem should then be solved.

Thinking this is a problem similar to a problem I had with antipiracy feature. My issue was that I had 2 computers a older slower computer and a better gaming system with a damaged DVD ROM that my daughter at age 2 decided to snap off the tray after pushing the button that she saw me push that makes tray pop out for a disc, and I figured why not just share through a drive mapping the DVD ROM on my slower machine for my faster machine to be able to play games that will play on the faster machine. Well it worked ok for some games that dont have antipiracy feature that verifies its a local drive, but for discs that have the antipiracy feature that verify that the disc is in a physical optical drive, the physical optical drive wasnt able to be detected over my NETWORK, i tried a few tricks to try to tricking it into seeing the drive as a DVD ROM when its is one, but it was showing up as a mapped drive which looked more like a hard drive with 4GB of read only data at it. *My solution was to just buy a DVD RW drive and replace it. But in the meantime open up both computers and borrow the older DVD ROM from the slower computer until the replacement came in.

THERE IS NO LEGAL WAY AROUND ANTI-PIRACY FEATURES. So Internal DVD Drive is needed!You need a No-Disc Patch for the game.

From what i can find, The Disc-based versions of F.E.A.R use an anti-piracy software called "SecuROM". SecuROM and SafeDisc are both ALTOGETHER incompatible with Windows 10. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say Windows 10 is intentionally incompatible with SecuROM and SafeDisc; as both have a large number of problems from having security vulnerabilities that allow attackers to run kernel level code to actually destroying certain types of CD and DVD Drives altogether or making drives "disappear" from the system and become inaccessible. Windows 8.1 also received a security update which disabled both technologies due to the issue.


A No-DVD patch for the game will allow you to play the game since it removes this DRM aspect to the title altogether. Given that the DRM METHOD is a known security flaw and can PHYSICALLY damage drives, I think we can make an exception to the general rule we have in regards to "Game cracks" for this one.Thanks for that info BC.... I wasnt aware of the issues with Windows 10 and older games with antipiracy. Learned something new and to be aware of when using my Windows 10 laptop with older games.