Hi Jersey Devil:
A warm welcome to our Forum. I am sorry you are having trouble getting the custom outings to run on your computer. I really hate to see someone who loves fishing and the RWFF game get stuck with installation problems. Here I will put a few points in a capsule for you and I hope you will find this helpful.
1)There is no need to write another check to buy another copy of RWFF when you already have a paid copy. After you deleted the old RWFF copy, just download and install a new one and reactivate it over the internet. You input your registration number that came with the original copy and Paul will give you another activation code over the internet in matters of seconds.
2)If you are running a OS system newer than XP (Vista, Windows7 or Windows8) you will need to create a Games folder under C: drive and install your RWFF into it or it might not work. The default install path was meant for XP. There is a slight difference in how the XP and the newer system in file handling.
3)The V.131 and V.133 were meant for outing creators who want to use 6 frames in their outing scenes. You will find most of the outings (include those created by V.131 and V.133) will work just fine on V.128. I think this is the version that will come with your download from Pishtech. Sorry but buying a new copy will not give you the V.131 and V.133 updates. You still need to download those and install them.
4)Think of the computer as a big library. When you install a new outing the computer will be looking for all the listed files of the new outing in the library. If some are missing then it will return an error. I have said this before but 99% of the time when you RWFF returns an error it is due to missing files in your system (library) and there is no need to reinstall the simulator. To get the custom outings to work you will need to download and install all the fish, food, sound files from the Club House and the RWFF Forum and put them into their respective folders (e.g. fish to fish folder, food to food folder, sound to sound folder) in the main RWFF program folder. It is a real time consuming job and a pain to download all those files but after you have done it then you can fish any of the more than 1000 titles we have in our RWFF outing collection without errors. Something worth doing!
5)There is a really great trouble shooting tool included with V.128 and later updates. It is called "File Verification". If you were to open the RWFF software and allow the File Verification on the start screen to run to the end, any error that the software detects (e.g. missing files, misplaced folders, etc) will be put into a "content_errors.txt" in your main RWFF folder. If you can copy the content_errors.txt and post it on the forum then we will be able to tell you what files are missing/or misplaced and what you will need to do to fix them. This is a very useful feature and you should take full advantage of it.
RWFF started life as a fairly small and simple game but it has grown into something much bigger and more complex since the day it was introduced. In my humble opinion it is a much more interesting and dynamic game now but the complexities of file download and installation has increased over the years. Still, it is not all that difficult to get everything working right so please bear with it as the reward will be great! You can fish almost anywhere in the world for exotic fishes from the comfort of your armchair. How great is that??
Please come back if you need help and someone will be around 24/7 to help you with your install problems.
Regards,
Stanley