Overview
A guide to people suffering from issues for running Mass Effect: Legendary Edition on Windows 7
Introuduction
Hi Everyone! This short guide should be able to help people who purchased Mass Effect: Legendary Edition for their Windows 7 Computer, in this guide i will be including the fix for the “Please reinstall your game” issue, and perhaps maybe later on i will include other fixes for other problems.
Without any further ado let’s dive right in.
How to fix the “Please Reinstall Your Game” Error
First off, some of you may have been trying to run the game through steam or origin for the first time, but each time you do you keep getting an error telling you to reinstall your game, something along those lines.
So you probably validated the files through steam, or repaired the game files through origin and both come back clean, so you try running the game again and get the same error, this is why.
Although Mass Effect: Legendary Edition is really just a upgrade to visuals mostly, surprisingly Windows 10 is listed as the MINIMUM REQUIREMENT to run the game.
However, Mass Effect: Legendary Edition does not include any features that require for example, the DirectX12 API, so it’s pretty strange that they’d list Windows 10 as the minimum requirement to get the game running, because anyone with the original copies of all 3 games can run them just fine and they are all pretty much the same when it comes to core of each game when you compare them to their Legendary Edition counterparts, as i said, it’s mostly been visual changes.
The real reason as to why the game isn’t running on Windows 7 is because some Mass Effect LE players have an artificially limited selection of languages in their original BioWare Mass Effect LE launcher. Which is why when you go to launch the game, it won’t work.
It took me some looking around on online forums until i found a solution that worked for me, as a Windows 7 Professional 64-Bit User, this should help anyone else suffering from the same problem.
What does this solution fix exactly?
The fix itself is actually just replacing the Mass Effect: Legendary Edition launcher with a modified file from the Nexusmods forums,here i’ll show you the steps on downloading and replacing the file in your game directory.
You’ll need a nexusmods account before you can download the file.
1. Go to this link – [link]
2. Click on the “Files” tab, when it loads you’ll see “Main files MassEffectLauncher-MELo”
Select “Manual Download” then “Slow download”.
3. Save the downloaded file to where you can access it.
4. Open the folder with a file managing tool like 7zip, and you should see 3 files, MassEffectLauncher.ahk, MassEffectLauncher.exe, and a readme file.
5. Next open up the directory of where you installed your game, just open up steam and right click MELE, go to properties, local files, browse.
Now go to the “Game” Folder, Launcher, and click and drag the MassEffectLauncher.exe from the downloaded folder into the Launcher folder, you will be prompted to replace the file, click yes.
NOW DO NOT CHANGE THE EXE IN ANYWAY, Like changing it to “Run as Administrator” as it is known to cause problems.
Once you’ve done all that, just run the game through steam or origin normally and you should see the new custom launcher, select the game you wish to play and call me daddy!
I hope this helps people who are having trouble getting past the launcher on Windows 7, it took me awhile of looking through various forums until i found a link to the mod.
Thanks to dvidebyzero for creating this modification, we all greatly appreciate it!
NOTE: You will still be able to grab achievements and track your game time, so don’t worry about that! 🙂
Stuttering On Planets With The Mako
Hi again everyone, this is somewhat of a solution to any of you that are currently having stuttering issues when exploring planets with the MAKO.
For some reason this works but not entirely, you can reduce the stuttering to a degree, but it won’t fully eliminate it.
I’ve tried playing around with having V-Sync on and off in the game settings, and i always have V-Sync off in my global settings by default in the Nvidia Control panel, So before anyone says it’s a V-Sync issue it isn’t, it’s something to do with the way the game interacts with Windows 7 as an Operating System (I assume).
i’m not sure why it does this as i had no issues exploring planets with the MAKO on my Windows 10 installation, but never the less the issue is there, and here’s a way to minimize it.
Once you’ve launched the game and have loaded into a playable area, for example the Presidium on the Citadel, you’ll want to Tab out of your game, depending whether you are using fullscreen or not, just press and hold CTRL + ALT + DEL (without pressing the + symbol obviously).
Next select “Start Task Manager” and make sure you are in the “Applications Window” you should see the game executable there. Next right click it and select “Go to Process” the executable should be highlighted for you, next you’ll wanna right click that and go to “Select Priority” and set the Priority to “High”. I’ve tried setting it to realtime but i don’t think it makes much of a differene.
Then just tab back into your game and proceed as normal, this worked for me and i hope it does for anyone else, this won’t entirely eliminate the problem but it’ll make the stuttering less noticeable.
Error 0x40999a73 For Mass Effect 2 & 3
If you had already installed the launcher from the nexus mods forum that i had linked in previously within this guide then Mass Effect 1 should be working fine, i just recently finished my renegade play through just fine, and was about to run Mass Effect 2 to continue to story, however i ran into another problem.
If you’re like me you’re getting an error that reads something like this:
The instruction at 0x40999a73 referenced memory at 0x00000000. The memory could not be read. Click on OK to terminate the program
I’m not exactly sure what’s causing the issue at the present moment, i’m trying to find answers online, but i’ll update the guide accordingly when i figure out a solution.
This problem also occurs for when launching Mass Effect 3.