Rave Ejay (1998) on Windows 10 64 bit

Introduction

Rave Ejay is a simple music program created by the German company PXD Musicsoft and released in 1998.
PDX software was often featured in magazines at the time, and that's how they got popular back in the day.
Despite its very simplistic nature, Rave Ejay had a decent number of samples and allowed users to easily create their music. Specifically, 90's rave music, with some trance elements too. It also came with a bunch of original demo songs, enough to fill an album.
Rave Ejay ran on Windows 95 and 98, but with some tricks it can be made to work on Windows 10 as well.

Before you continue, take a moment to check out the newer versions of Ejay and their store here and here, they're still around :)

What we need

  • Windows 10 64 bit (this tutorial will not work on Windows 10 32 bit)
  • WinCDEmu: this is a free and open source tool for easily mounting disc images.
  • Rave Ejay disc image. From now on we'll refer to this as "the image".
    Note: even if this is old software and it's no longer available for purchase, you must legally own a Rave Ejay disc to download this image.

Preparing the environment

First of all, install WinCDEmu with the default settings.

Now go to your C: drive and create a new folder called RaveeJay and enter it.

Open the downloaded disc image archive (raveejay.7z) using 7-zip, WinRAR or another archive manager and extract the image (raveejay.iso) into the RaveeJay folder.

Installation

Right click the image and mount it to the V: drive. Make sure not to change this letter as Rave Ejay will remember it.

As it's common with these old applications, the installer has some 16 bit parts and will not launch right away.

Copy RAVE.exe to the RaveeJay folder

Now go back to the drive and enter the RAVE folder, then the EJAY folder. Do not run anything yet.

Click File, then Open a command prompt as administrator

Type this command and press enter

regsvr32 comdlg32.ocx

This will install an old library required to run Rave Ejay (and many other obsolete applications from its time).

Now close the command prompt, and find the Raveejay.exe executable, right click and run it as administrator

Rave Ejay will start. Let its play the intro or it will crash. When it's done, select Full Installation

Now that it's done copying files, close Rave Ejay. You will see a folder with some shortcuts, don't close it.

Open Notepad. We will now create a new launcher for Rave Ejay that will mount and unmount the disc image automatically when you start and close the application.
Copy this text:

@echo off
pushd "%~dp0"
"C:\Program Files (x86)\WinCDEmu\batchmnt.exe" /unmount V:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\WinCDEmu\batchmnt.exe" raveejay.iso V: /wait
V:
cd RAVE\EJAY
RaveEjay.exe
"C:\Program Files (x86)\WinCDEmu\batchmnt.exe" /unmount V:

Close notepad and save with this name: C:\RaveeJay\rave.bat

Now go back to the folder with the shortcuts, right click Rave eJay and click Properties.
Replace Target with C:\RaveeJay\rave.bat, then change the icon and select C:\RaveeJay\RAVE.exe
In the end it will look like this:

Delete the other shortcuts in this directory, and if you want, copy the Rave eJay shortcut to your desktop.

Launch Rave Ejay

You can now launch Rave Ejay from your start menu. Our little script will take care of everything.

Note that Rave Ejay only supports resolutions up to 1024x768, so there will be black borders around it on high resolution screens.

And now you can enjoy this old program again!

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