Creative Writer

What works

Installation, including web publishing wizard installation.

With some tweaks, it's possible to get the program running and sort of working. All templates tested work, as do all text effect, undo and redo, about Creative Writer, sound, printing, saving as RTF or TXT, and of course, typing some text into the program.

What does not

To get the program running, CWWEB.DLL and SKYHOOK.DLL must be copied to the program folder. They can be found in the "System" subfolder of the program folder.

From there, the program runs but has a lot of other bugs. The most immediately noticeable problem is that the program colors are way off - lots of red. It does render almost normally at 8-bit color depth, but not 16-bit or 32-bit color depth, and you're most likely using one of those.

The "tour of Creative Writer" video which plays automatically on the first run works to some extent, but the program hangs after playing it for a while. It works correctly if winetricks ffdshow is used. Note that it won't display automatically on the second run even if the video didn't work, so ffdshow isn't required to use the rest of the program.

The program produces a message complaining about not being able to load some media every time it's started up. It hangs when trying to scroll the list of available fonts. Saving files in MAX format or EXE "e-mail packages" fails. Inserting a picture also fails. The program is prone to seemingly-random hangs and graphical glitches.

Somehow, my system lost sound until the next reboot after using this program for a while. That problem most likely involves an audio driver bug, though.

Uninstallation doesn't work for either the web publishing wizard or the main program.

Workarounds

What was not tested

Some of the templates, word art, loading a previously saved MAX file, and other misc. features not mentioned previously.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments