Finally its working on Win 8.1!
 

Thanks to Blitzkreigs sh3 guide and posts from numerous other silent hunter 3 fans I am now sailing the atlantic with my vastly more powerful rig. I just wanted to thank you all at Subsim. I thought I was going to have to keep my 12 year old intel desktop preserved as a functional museum piece after numerous all day attempts at watching loading bars with fingers crossed and swearing aloud when the error messages pop up. My old computer looks as old and sounds the same as Alan Turings contraption that dealt the Uboats a deadly blow lol. If only I had followed the instructions in this forum properly so much time could have been saved. To anyone else attempting to do what I have acheived the answers are already on this forum.

So often the case, but not always so easy to find even with the search facility.

Glad you're sorted, now you'll have to do it all again for your free copy of Windows 10 (Surely to be named WinX?)

I think you just managed to turn me away from reinstalling my laptop to Win8...

Once you install the game, you can copy-paste the game to Windows XP-7-8-8.1-8-7-XP. You can zip-rar-compress and unzip-unrar the game without a problem.
I think I only installed the game once or twice in my whole life.
I'm not talking here about the steam version or game with copy-protected sh3.exe.
Mine (1.4b) came with a magazine (Micromania) in a DVD without extra charge.

I tried that first. It only works if the other PC is also Win XP for me that is. I needed to re jig hsies supplement and apply 4gb patch anyway and I felt a clean install would be better after reading the guide. The above posts method has worked when I have borked a previously stable install and I have copied and pasted a back up copy in its place.

I have an original installation which I have labeled "Do Not Use!!!". Whenever I need to start over (which seems to be often) I copy and paste that directly to a folder just for that version (my current working copy just says "GWX"). I control it with Multi-SH3.

After making my SH3 work again I made a .zip file of SH3+GWX+V16B1+widescreen that I'm just going to store on every single harddisk I have.

I'm the same, I have all my variant SH games in different folders on a 2TB USB drive, so that I can copy to any system and play straight away.

But 9 times out of ten, I run multi SH3 / SH4 mega moda from this drive direct, however I'm not able to run SH5...