This little tweak has been available from our forum for a few weeks now thanks to Per who apparently is still running the old trusty Win2k (and you thought you were being conservative keeping XP for a while longer). It has been confirmed by users this should work for both demo and full versions of the game that officially only supports XP SP2 and Vista.

To play Bioshock on Windows 2000 you need two files, dbghelp.dll and xinput1_3.dll:

• You can get dbghelp.dll from a Windows XP or 2003 install, the version I used which worked was 5.2.3790.3959 from a 2003 SP2 server install.
• You can find the xinput1_3.dll on Bioshock’s install DVD or in the root directory of the demo zipfile in a folder called “dx redist” Open the file APR2007_xinput_x86.cab and extract the .dll file.
• Now you need to open it in a HEX Editor, I use Hex Workshop.
  Search for the textstring: “TraceMessage” and replace that with “GetUserNameA”
• Place both .dll files in the games install directory under \Builds\Release
  (Don’t overwrite the files in your winnt/system32 dir!)

That should do the trick! You may want to install the latest videocard drivers available, too, since both Nvidia and ATI have addressed bugs and optimizations targeted to Bioshock. More information and user feedback on this fix can be found in our forums. Enjoy, and thank Per!