Getting Venetica to work on Windows 11

This thing was a nightmare to make work. These are the steps that ultimately worked for me.

This guide

This guide will go over the things that made this game finally work on my PC. No success guarantee, but it might save you a bunch of googling and bashing your head against your screen.

Locating your files

Before we start fiddling with files, we need to know where they are. These are instructions for the Steam version.

The install folder should be in your default Steam install directory. An easy way to find the directory is to right click Venetica in your Steam library -> Manage -> Browse Local Files.



By default, Venetica's save file location is most likely in your Documents folder, but we can redirect that later for stability.

Run in compatibility mode

This should dramatically help stability, as well as make it functional to begin with in case your game wasn't launching to begin with.

In your install folder, go to Bin -> Release. In there should be the Venetica.exe. Right click the exe, go to Properties, Compatibility, check "Run this program in compatibility mode for:" and then choose "Windows XP (Service Pack 2)" from the drop down menu. Click apply.

Run the 4GB patch

I had a lot of crashes because of memory issues. The 4GB patch should fix these. It can be found on Nexus Mods here.[www.nexusmods.com] You also require HxD for this step, which can be downloaded here.[mh-nexus.de] Follow the instructions on the Nexus mods page. The instructions were made with an older version of HxD, you can find where you need to import the file for step 2 on the image below.

Install PhysX

If your game is not starting at all, it might be because PhysX isn't installed. Steam version should have it by default, but it might not have installed properly.

Just install it via Nvidia's site here.[www.nvidia.com] If it says you already have a newer version installed, then you don't need to do anything else.

Change your save data path

This might help improve stability. Open user_dir in notepad. It probably only says Venetica in there. This is what causes your save data path to be in Documents.



Copy the path to your Venetica folder, and replace the word Venetica in user-dir with the path. Your file should look something like this (your path might differ).



If you already have a save file, copy all the files in the Venetica folder in Documents, and paste it to your install folder instead. It might ask if you're okay with overwriting files if you booted up the game somewhere while doing this steps. Just click yes.

Running in "Borderless" Fullscreen

Runnning in "borderless" fullscreen

Older games tend to crash when alt-tabbing, so it's best to run the game windowed, and of course ideally borderless windowed. You can run Venetica like this, though it might not properly capture your mouse. (But you can just play with a controller and then that's not a problem.)

First off, you have to get Venetica to run into windowed mode. Whilst that is technically not possible through in-game menu's, it is possible through one of its ini files. Either in your Venetica folder in Documents, or in your Venetica default install location if you moved the save location in a previous step, open settings-user.ini in notepad. In the third category, there's an option to change whether the game starts fullscreen or not. Set this to false.



It should now launch windowed. You could now use a third party software to have it be borderless windowed if that's what you want. I use Borderless Gaming, which is available in Steam, but there should also be free options out there. I just don't have them for you.