I've been trying to get various light/sound novels to run on my laptop for a while now, first Umineko no naku koroni and currently Steins;Gate. I've been told that I have to change the regional setting to Japanese in order to do this, and that's what I'm having trouble with.

When I click the drop-down list and select japanese, then click apply, I get a message saying 'System was unable to install the chosen locale. Please contact your system administrator.' A quick google told me that the problem was probably a badly installed east asian language pack, so I corrected that, first through several different back up CDs of various windows OSs, then through the CD my laptop actually came with, and finally from a language folder I got off the internet. The last one seemed to work, but still no luck.

I'm running Windows XP media center edition system pack 3, not sure which bit.

Anyone have any idea what the hell the problem is? I'd had this issue for about a year now, and it's driving me nuts.

 

Download VLC.

http://download.cnet.com/VLC-Media-Player/3000-13632_4-10267151.html

 

Have it, love it, how does it help?

 

Styx is talking about Steins;Gate, the video game [visual novel], not the more recent anime.

 

If you can't switch to Japanese, it must be because you haven't proprely installed the Locale, which is usually done when you install/upgrade Windows. You can grab it from most windows installation disks - it's very possible the one you tried to get off the internet wasn't compatible/sufficient.

 

Like I said, I've tried several discs. What would you suggest?

 

So, you did this? I'm not sure if it will work with the media center edition, but to install the language pack, you need a XP Professional disc. Home or another media center disc most likely won't work (if I remember correctly, that is).

You could also check if you find an "cplexe.exe" using windows search (be sure to include hidden files and folders). If you find that on your PC, then point the language pack installation to the folder the cplexe.exe is in.

 

No. No Language pack is necessary. Yes, you do need to change your system location to Japan (Do this via control panel, if you were unaware) and then run the Novel/game/Hentai as an administrator.

If you're unable to change the location then check if you were running as admin. ( If you have multiple login accounts on your system.)

If all that is proper, then try the program that changes your location for a particular program only. I used this one long time ago before I switched to Win 7. App Locale or something. It says HF pAppLoc.exe. Don't quite remember the name. >_>

Edit : Yeah. Found it out. The program is AppLocale. After installing it, you should get an option "Run as Administrator with Japanese Locale" as one of the options when you right click an exe file.

 

I was about to recommend Vistalizator, which is a tool to help install language packages on versions of Windows that don't support it (i.e. not Ultimate) before I noted that you're running XP.

So my recommendation:
1. Upgrade to Win7 or 8
2. Use Vistalizator
3. ???
4. Profit

 

Just as a word of caution, AppLocale only works for Windows XP (which is a damn shame if you're like me, who wants to stay in English locale while ocassionally booting Japanese programs), so upgrading to W7/8 will remove that as an alternative.

 

I just had a look at AppLocale's Wikipedia page, and it claims that there's a workaround to get Microsoft AppLocale Utility on everything from Windows Vista to Windows 8.

 

Thanks guys, but I've still got issues.

I used Applocale, but it tells me 'Your system does not have support for the selected language installed!'

I'm only half surprised by that, since Japanese isn't showing up right, but I have no idea why.

I've gone through control panel > regional and language options > languages. I checked the 'install support for east asian languages' box, I hit apply. I've installed the relevant files from three different discs, and when that didn't work I tried it again from a file I torrented. Admittedly I had to google for a few fonts that it was missing, but once I had those it went fine, no error messages.

I followed all the instructions I could find, and as far as I can tell, I did everything right. Unless there's a step after telling it where the files are and waiting, I'm baffled.

Any ideas?

A friend of mine is running 7, the game is working fine on his computer. Could I make a copy of the language files from his? I get the feeling that I have all the right files, but either they aren't where they're supposed to be, or my machine can't read them for some reason.

World - My current computer is an (excessively) beaten up Gateway laptop that was bought premade in either 2005 or 2006. It can't handle 7.

Sacro - Yeah, I did that. No professional disc, the damn thing wandered off somewhere. No file called cplexe.exe to be found.

 

It sounds like maybe an unregistered dll, or something wrong in the registry. I don't know. I hope you find a simple solution, but if I'd tried everything I could think of on an XP system, I'd re-install the OS. XP often gets clunky after a while and it's a good idea to re-birth it every now and again. Or try the 'repair' option first. That sometimes worked.

 

Ha, I was just thinking myself that it was about time for a nuke and reformat.

Come to think of it, an antivirus program I used earlier told me I had an issue I identified as a star-up error. Could that be causing it?

 

Take a look here. You did the installation, but did you select japanese as the language for non-unicode programs?

 

When I try to change it, it tells me 'Setup was unable to install the chosen locale. Please contact your system administrator.'

 

Hm so it really isn't installing it correctly. I could upload you the language folder from my professional disc somewhere, if you want to try it with that again.

 

Sure, I'll give it a shot. Thanks.

 

Here you go.

 

Finally had the time to try it, and still no joy. Thanks, but I'm thinking it's some weird issue with media center edition, or something. I'm going to try a fix for the start up issue I mentioned, and if that doesn't work I'll wipe and reformat with something less finicky.