Saving the Masters of the Elements From Getting Lost to Time: Epilogue.

Every journey comes to an end, and this is the end of a very personal journey that started back in May 2025. A lot has happened since then: I uncovered what breaks the game, how to fix it, bought all available versions of the game I could find (including some quite expensive shipping from Japan to Germany), did some last-minute fixes, and discovered some secrets.

Thanks to the help of my incredibly talented friends from the ScummVM project, and thanks to everyone following me on this adventure over the last couple of months, I finally proudly present: The patch files required to play “Masters of the Elements” on Windows 2000 and higher, up to Windows 11.

Enjoy!

Note: All downloads listed below only contain the changes necessary to fix the compatibility issues. An origial copy is required to play the game. Without the original game, these files are worthless.

Edition	Patch	Data directory
Masters of the Elements	melements-win-en_patch.zip	MVM
Masters of Elements: Unmei no Shihaisha	melements-win-jp_patch.zip	(none)
Le Maître des Éléments	melements-win-fr_patch.zip	MdE
Meister Zufall und die Herrscher der Elemente	melements-win-de_patch.zip	MVM
I Signori degli Elementi	melements-win-it_patch.zip	MVM
Meesters van Macht	melements-win-nl_patch.zip	MvM

Installation

• Download the patch set that matches your version.
• Copy the contents of the data directory from your disc to your hard drive.
• Copy the contents of the Xtras directory from the patch files in your new game directory.
• Copy the file scripts.cst to data/global/, and delete the scripts.cxt in the same directory.
• Copy the file intro.dir to data/intro/, and delete the file intro.dxr in the same directory.
• Start the game with the executable (MVM.EXE or MDE.EXE).
• Have fun!

README & FAQ

I can’t find the data directory on my disc

On most of the releases, the data directory is hidden by default. Enable the “Show hidden items” option in Explorer to reveal it.

When copying the data directory to my hard drive, my PC locks up on the folders ZDAT, ZYDAT, or ZZDAT

Some releases of the English and German versions of the game use a copy protection called “copy-X”. This copy protection uses a “blank” area on the disc that contains absolutely no information. In the data directory, you’ll find a (hidden) folder called ZDAT, ZYDAT, or ZZDAT containing about 100 MB of data. And here’s the trick: The data is not there, but the files are “mapped” to that blank area, causing your CD reader to hang. To check if your disc is affected, visually inspect the data side of the disc: If there’s a visible ring (about 1-2mm thick) at the outer area of the disc, then this disc is protected.

To mitigate this, open the data directory and copy everything except the dummy folders: The game never checks these files.

The game runs in a tiny window with a very large black border. What can I do?

When you start the game, you’ll notice that the game is rendered really, really small, especially when using a larger screen resolution. The game is designed around a screen resolution of 640x480 pixels, with a color depth of 256 colors. Since the game cannot change its resolution, it relies on helper applications that do the resolution switching. Unfortunately, these helper applications won’t work anymore. The perfect solution for this problem is a small utility called Res-o-Matic by bCheck. This tool allows you to select an application and specify the resolution it should run in. Then, it will create a shortcut file that switches your display to the chosen resolution, launches the application, and returns to the original resolution after the program exits. Really convenient! I used this tool for the entirety of this series, so I can’t recommend it enough. Thank you, bCheck!

At startup, I get an error message regarding temporary file access with error code -34

This issue mainly occurs on the French and Italian releases, and on my version of Meesters van Macht (which is a re-release primarily marketed in Belgium). The game is notoriously susceptible to breaking whenever anything else on your system is trying to access the game data files the moment the game itself requests access to them. Unfortunately, the affected versions bundle one data file required by the game (CHECK.DXR) in the main executable.

The problem: When trying to start the game the first couple of times, Windows Defender will reliably check the main executable, thus blocking read access to the embedded CHECK.DXR file. For the French and Dutch versions, you can safely ignore this error message, since by the time the intro screen from the publishers finishes playing, access to CHECK.DXR is released, and the game continues just fine.

The Italian version, however, has no additional intro screen, so it tries to directly jump into the (blocked) CHECK.DXR file. One thing CHECK.DXR does is to determine if you are running the game on Windows or Macintosh, and if this check fails, you’ll get some very bad side effects, like broken audio and missing speech output. If you see this error message on the Italian version, the game will break, so you have to close the game and start over.

To mitigate this, I recommend excluding the game directory of the affected versions from your antivirus and any backup/cloud synchronisation software. What also worked pretty reliably for me was to wait a couple of minutes after copying over the game files to let things settle down. YMMV.

At startup, the Japanese version shows a text box with garbled text

That’s normal and will happen if your machine is set to any other locale than Japanese. You can safely ignore this error.

At startup, the Dutch version complains that my system is not set to 256 colors

This warning can be safely ignored; you can continue playing the game.

In the Italian version, the colors at the beginning of the Room of Gravity are messed up

Yes, and right now, I don’t understand why this happens. This is one of those bugs that should either happen on all versions or not at all. I’m currently investigating.

Will the game still work on Windows 95 and 98?

Yes, though I can’t guarantee that there are no color issues on some configurations. I recommend to stick to the unpatched version.

What’s next?

Well, for this project, this is it. I will look into the remaining issues related to parallel file access and the graphics issues in the Italian version, but right now, it is time for me to take a break and focus on something else. I still have some hardware from 1999 sitting around here that’s waiting to see a datacenter from the inside again for way too long, but that’s a story for another time.

…to be continued… one day.

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But there is one more thing.

…to be continued. For real.

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