KotOR 1 BOPC hanging after character creation

[ZeldaTheSwordsman]

For reference, I'm playing on Windows 7. That normally shouldn't be an issue, because of the version of KotOR I'm using, but who knows.

Tried installing my copy of KotOR (which is the Best of PC version) from scratch once again, to see if I could get it working. This time it installed intact enough on its own to actually start up and get me to the main menu and character creation (the previous install attempt proved to be corrupted and I had to replace the original swkotor.exe with the editable executable version to get that far). However, I'm running into the same problem I was with the previous install attempt: after completing character generation and going through the first loading screen, the game hangs on a black screen instead of actually loading the intro movie. When I try to nudge it past that point, it just flat-out crashes and exits out of the game.

What is it that's broken and causing this? Is it something in swkotor.exe itself, or one of the other game files? I'm pretty sure it can't be the actual .bik movies themselves, because I tried playing them all separately.

EDIT: ...The .wav audio files seem to be almost all corrupted (and some are possibly missing entirely). The main menu music plays in game, as do sounds for selecting menu options, so those files are presumably intact (assuming they're even separate and not baked into the executable). But almost all the audio files in the folders? Won't load at all, will load but not actually play, or will "play" but only in VLC and what they play as is horrendous static.

Could this be the cause? And if so, is there any place I can get replacement files?  I have been informed after further research that the files are encoded (or else just renamed MP3s) so this probably isn't it. Unless there are some missing (there's no 2, 5, 8, 9, 11-15, 20, 21, 23, 25-30, 32, 33, 36-41, 43, 45-49, 52, or 53 amongst the numbered files)?

Edited January 17, 2021 by ZeldaTheSwordsman

[TamerBill]

You seem to be having a lot of trouble with this installation. I've installed KotOR on several wildy-different machines over the years and it's always just worked, so unless you're doing something very wrong I'd suspect the blame lies with the Best of PC version.

Try the fixes here, see if that does anything for you. Otherwise I'd just suggest dropping 7 quid to get it on Steam or GOG instead.

[ZeldaTheSwordsman]

28 minutes ago, TamerBill said:

You seem to be having a lot of trouble with this installation. I've installed KotOR on several wildy-different machines over the years and it's always just worked, so unless you're doing something very wrong I'd suspect the blame lies with the Best of PC version.

Try the fixes here, see if that does anything for you. Otherwise I'd just suggest dropping 7 quid to get it on Steam or GOG instead.

I'd rather buy a new Xbox copy and live with no modding than get it on Steam.

But after Googling I found the problem: Frame Buffer Effects. I turned those off, and the game now runs just fine.