How to get Thief games to run on Vista and Win7:

1) Turn off UAC, and make sure you have administrator rights.
2) Install the game using the command d:\setup.exe -LGNTFORCE from a Run command, where "d" is the drive letter of your DVD drive. This may take up to 2 hours. Do not install it in the Program Files directories.
3) Run the game. You will almost certainly crash the game, but is required since it populates some lines in a config file.
4) Download DDFix. Unzip both the ddfix.dll & ddfix.ini files to the game directory.
5) Open the game executable in a hex-editor such as PSPad. Search for the string "ddraw.dll" and replace it with "ddfix.dll". Save and quit.
6) Open the ddfix.ini file in Notepad, and make sure the following ines are correct:
gWidth=1280
gHeight=1024
MultiCoreFix=1
VideoFix=1
They should be set to these already.
7) Go to cam.cfg, open it in Notepad, and set the resolution to 1280x1024, with the line
game_screen_size 1280 1024
8) It should all be ready to go :) Sometimes the videos require the K-lite codec pack to be installed, but I don't think this is usually the case in Vista or Win7, just XP.
9) Turn back on UAC, if you want it on. Make sure you run the game as administrator.

Hope this helps, am doing this from memory, will check the config files in a bit and edit this post :)

Download links:
DDFix:
http://www.gamefront.com/files/16384349/ddfix-1.4.5-complete.zip/

PSPad (for the hex-editing, you can uninstall it afterwards):
http://www.pspad.com/

[Edit - checked the actual lines in the ini & cfg files]

Just my take. Playing Invisible War after playing DX1 is like driving for NASCAR and then driving a school bus later. IMHO, DX:IW was a very mediocre game compared to the standard games out at the time. But compared to DX1... its an abomination. (keep in mind, this is just my opinion). Make sure you get fully patched when you try DX:IW as the base game had some major problems that the patch resolved. There are also some texture mods that will help. Its not a bad bargain bin game, but its not at all what I expected coming from that franchise.

Thief, on the other hand, clearly changed developers for the 3rd title. I don't care for how it controls at all, and it had its own downgrades to accommodate for the console version (same issue with IW). But somehow they managed to keep the ambiance, story, and gameplay close enough to the originals that it still felt like Thief.

Also, If you check all the Thief links provided so far, you should have a pretty decent game experience with nicer textures, widescreen, better models, etc. I didn't see the audio link so I'll add that one: Updates some of the audio files to cleaner ones.

http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=119405

Finally, when you get finished, there are hundreds and hundreds of fan mods to play with Thief. Some just as good as the original game or better.

Thief-thecirlce.com and thiefmissions.com are great places for the missions. You will need Garrettloader to play the missions. It can be found here:

http://www.shadowdarkkeep.com/downloadst3.htm

It says thief 3, but its actually a common loader for several games including T1, T2, and SS2.

Haven't read the rest of the posts, just responding to OP, so excuse me if some of this is repeated.

Thief: Deadly Shadows is a pretty good game, but if you play that, you are cheating yourself if you haven't played the first two. Thief: The Dark Project (And Thief Gold) have key things that are directly referenced in Thief DS, so you aren't going to understand what those are. Some elements of Thief II are there as well, but not as major. Thief II: The Metal Age is my personal favorite, since the gameplay is perfect and the story is considerably darker (no pun intended) than the first game.

Deus Ex is similar to Thief in terms of stealth, but thats about it. DX is more of an open world. The levels aren't split like Thief are, but you still have the ability to explore and they are generally non-linear. Deus Ex is probably a bit more complex because you have so many weapons, augmentations, and items to keep track of, and loads and loads of dialogue and NPC interactions that can impact the game in various ways, while Thief always has the same outcome no matter how you play it. DX:IW is nowhere near as good, but I recommend playing it just to see how they executed it. Personally, I don't think of the second game as canonical.

I highly recommend both games, but if you had to choose between one, I think it depends on if you prefer cyberpunk or steampunk/industrial as your preferred genre.

This is worth emphasising, Thief has literally hundreds of Fan Missions, some of the authors of which have gotten Mapper jobs in the Games industry because of the quality of their work.

I don't think that you are doing DX justice here. It's a great, fantastic game, but it really isn't as tough to get into as you are saying. Also, choice in the game is mostly an illusion anyway, as there is very little that you can do to actually affect the game.

ATM i'm at the M12 level of Deus ex (close to the ending i hope) and deadly shadows i just started (with all the advicec on how to make it run i could wait, perhaps I can play 1 and 2 afterwards and enjoy the similarities the other way around? A little like playing gothic 2 before gothic 1:) any, way i must say that i enjoy deus ex more, probably because i havent gotten too far into thief, actually im on the second lvl. But MAN it was hard to get working! with widescreenpatches, DEP, new exe files and user patches for crashes, that is just not fun... WHat i dont like about it is taht it doesstn feel "loved" by the ccreators, not the same atmospehe, scale, story (this far) and impact s deus ex, which Ion storm really nailed IMO. Still, i've read a little about the shalebridge cradle, so i might have something to look forward to:) Thansk for all great, great,great replies. It's amazing how proffesional you guys are:D

Don't do that, this location is best experienced with no prior knowledge whatsoever.
Creepy, creepy level ==


v The Metal Age is better.

Deadly Shadows is AWESOME!

When Harvey Smith was approached about Deus Ex, he was asked to make any game he liked, with little constraints. In contrast, Thief Deadly Shadows was put together under severe time constraints, and they had to spend most of that time changing the engine so that it could do all the Thief stuff (dynamic shadows interacting with AI, audio propagation via EAX, etc which most games don't need) whilst still squeezing the levels into 64Mb RAM so that it could run on the XBox. It wasn't helped that the guy who did the dynamic shadowing did it in an inefficient way, got fired, and then the mappers couldn't sort it all out before the release date. Which is why a lot of the levels feel quite small. The game was so rushed that the maps in the game are the hand-written diagrams the mappers used for their own use, scanned in :) The Thief 3 developers generally did care a lot about the game (some of them worked out-of-hours to release the level editor for the fans, for no pay) but their hands were tied.

This is not exclusive to Thief 3, by the way, Thief 2 was incredibly rushed to get it released before Looking Glass went bankrupt. In fact, it's quite brave of the new developers to take on Thief 4 considering what Thief does to companies :D