Grand Theft Auto San Andreas - Mouse Problem, Windows 8 - Tech Tuesday

Hello All! :)
And welcome to my blog on this amazing Tech Tuesday! :) I hope you all are doing great, and hey! I guess I kept my word and posted soon, right? LOL! :D



So yesterday, my bro re-installed Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. Since now I too use Windows 8(I have used 95,98,me,200,XP,Vista,7 also), so I thought the game might give a better performance than that on 7, but to my amazement, it was same as Windows Vista! A havoc!! The problem was that Microsoft claimed Windows 8 to have better backward compatibilty. But no! The same Mouse problem was still there. The earlier solution I posted for Windows 7/Vista(Link Here) doesn't work well with Windows 8. But there is a little change only, so don't feel irritated. Just for convinience sake, I am reposting it as a separate solution for the Windows 8.

The problem that I encountered was that my mouse never worked in the game. These are the days of the USB mice, so I don't know if they encounter the problem with a PS/2 mouse too, I am using a USB one, and I had problems! At first I thought it was just the menu where it didn't work, but no! it never worked in the game too! huh! Similar to Windows 7 and Vista, right? ugh!

Remember what I said about WIndows 7 bit? What did I do? There was a small way I found out to overcome this problem. That was to repeatedly press "Esc" until the mouse starts working. This way the game ran perfectly a couple of times, and as soon as I became happy, I came to know - uh! I got happy a bit too soon! huh!! The game started to crash after some instances of pressing "Esc". Not only that, if in case, my mouse started to work properly, it would go off suddenly! duh!!

I re-installed Windows XP, and saw that XP didn't show this problem. For a moment I saluted Microsoft for such a shitty bug in it's much hype-gathering Operating System Windows 7(I won't say that about Vista, because much had been said against it already by the whole world! LOL!).

But now I will say that Windows 8 too was too hyped and turned shittier in this regard! The mouse moving thing does not work with Windows 8. Windows 8 was told to be backward compatible but it is not.

So the solution is : Change the game properties and run it in compatibility mode under Windows XP Service Pack 3. Notice the change over Win7 solution. In Win8 we change the compatibility to Windows XP Service Pack 3, but in Windows 7 we used to change it Windows98/Me. How to do this? Simple! Follow these steps :

STEP 1. Right click the GTA shortcut.

STEP 2. In the menu click Properties.

STEP 3. A Properties window will come up. Click the Compatibility tab.

STEP 4. Under Compatibility mode, check the box that says Run this program in compatibility mode for:
Then select Windows XP Service Pack 3 from the dropdown list.

For convenience, Pics follow as per above instructions:

The mouse problem is now solved! :) but well! Now the new thing that you would see is, when you run the game, you cannot find any saved games files. Don't worry, they are not deleted. Actually when ran under compatibility mode, the game saves its files in the "Public Documents" instead of the documents of the user earlier. So all you got to do is, go to the Users folder in the drive in which you installed the Windows. Now open the folder of the "Username". "Username" is the name of your user that you created. In that, open Documents. You would see a folder named "GTA San Andreas User Files". For simplicity, since most users install Windows in C: Drive, the link to this folder is like this - "C:\Users\your username\Documents\GTA San Andreas User Files". now copy this folder into the Documents in Public. For example, if you Windows is in Drive C:, copy the folder to "C:\Users\Public\Documents\". And then! hey! You are done! :) Now your new files will be saved in this Public Documents only. So if you wish to back them up later, you have to backup them from Public!

Problem solved, and superb results! I hope it helps all! :)

UPDATE!!!!(13/03/2013)

One of the readers(Brendon Topp) suggested this if the compatibility tab doesn't come: "If the compatibility tab isn't there try right clicking the gta-sa.exe and clicking troubleshoot compatibility. This is how you change the compatibility options."

ANOTHER UPDATE!!!!(19/03/2013)

The following method was posted by a reader named, "Ajeya Rengarajan". Thanks to him for sharing this.

CAUTION: But let me caution the amateur users that this method asks to edit registry. So do it at your own risk.

Run the registry editor by going to RUN and type regedit . Tap OK
In regedit, navigate to each location below one at a time and do the steps below for each
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers
In the right pane of Layers, right click or press and hold on a empty area, then click/tap on New and String Value
Type in the full path of the program's exe file and press Enter, then double click/tap on the full path
Type This in the "DATA VALUE" portion:
~ RUNASADMIN 16BITCOLOR WIN98
Click ok and exit the registry editor. Run GTA: C:\Program Files\Rockstar Games\GTA SanAndreas\gta sa.exe

ANOTHER UPDATE!!!!(03/02/2014)

If you have a Microsoft USB Mouse, then you should not use the Driver update. When I updated my driver, the mouse stopped working. Just make sure you use compatibility mode for the game, and don't install the USB mouse driver. It works fine then.

NOTE:

The mouse may not work in the game menus(Start Game screen and Resume/Options,etc. screen) well even after this solution, but will work without problems in the game.


Thanks all for reading and commenting on this post. I hope everyone is helped.