Curious George Early Learning Adventure claims it is "unable to find 32-bit smacker dll" despite it being present in the folder

[KirbyFan102]

I can confirm I have the latest version, which was released a day ago as of the posting of this report.

Describe the bug
The game Curious George: Early Learning Adventure is unable to start, apparently due to the lack of a "32-bit smacker dll". Now, I presume this is smackw32.dll, which I had previously downloaded to try and run the 32-bit version of the executable. Both executables and the dlls they asked for are in the same folder, so there shouldn't be an issue, yet it gives this error message and stays in a black screen.

Expected behavior
Game detects all necessary dlls and runs normally.

Environment (please complete the following information):

• OS: Windows 10
• Version: 22H2

Additional context
I am trying to run the 16-bit version of the game due to the fact that the 32-bit version gives another error message about how it was unable to find such and such procedure in the ELA32.exe dynamic link library (even though it's an .exe file, not a dll file...?), so my only recourse is to either run it in a virtual machine or use this program. If you have any suggestions or have seen such an error message before, though, I'm all ears.

[KirbyFan102]

Update: I also tried running the setup.exe file to see if installing the game instead of running the .exes directly would work better, but it results in the installation freezing halfway through like this:

Running the setup as administrator makes it even worse, as it then claims it is unable to find the specified file and doesn't run at all.

Finally, I tried to bypass the issue by installing the game on Windows 3.1 with DOSBox, going to the installation directory on regular Windows, and running the executable I found there. But, while otvdm doesn't display any issues on the command window in this case, it's still stuck on a black screen and the game doesn't run.

[cracyc]

Both the win32 and win16 version hang on trying to find the cdrom volume control even if it doesn't exist. The win32 version also needs the wine wing32.dll as the supplied fails to load. If sound is disabled in the cgela.ini file then it starts but there's no sound and it switches to the exit screen after a minute for no reason. I don't know what to do with it. Maybe dxwnd can help.

[KirbyFan102]

Both the win32 and win16 version hang on trying to find the cdrom volume control even if it doesn't exist. The win32 version also needs the wine wing32.dll as the supplied fails to load. If sound is disabled in the cgela.ini file then it starts but there's no sound and it switches to the exit screen after a minute for no reason. I don't know what to do with it. Maybe dxwnd can help.

I see, that's a shame. Either way, thank you for the taking the time to look into this as well. I'll keep looking for alternative solutions for this curiously stubborn program.

[cracyc]

Dxwnd can be used to make it work. Check https://sourceforge.net/p/dxwnd/discussion/general/thread/a262e1e9b0/ for info.