Hello! Thanks to the efforts of the reservation community, ad discs were found for the first game as well.
There were several such disks. At least two. But they differ mainly only in the fixed bugs and the fact that the desktop wallpapers were either published in separate folders or not.
Let’s take a look at the contents of the disk. In the most complete version, you can find on it:
1. Folders with wallpaper for the Desktop, with the emblem of the game in 4 languages: English, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. In each folder, you can find 4 pictures in bmp format (640×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1280×960) and a Visual Basic program that displays the “File Not Found” message and exits. Program name: Project1. It looks like it was done in a hurry.
In the pictures themselves, you can find sketches depicting Albus Dumbledore, Hagrid and Harry with an owl.
2. Desktop theme installer (for Windows 95/98/2000).
3. A Visual Basic program that launches a trailer of a game in the default player. Next to it is a service file with the name of the executable file…
4. The hpbook.exe menu program created with Flash technology. Its task is to show 5 flags. By clicking on one of them, you launch an advertising brochure. The booklet files are located in the same folder, one file per language. booklets are available in English, Italian, Japanese (incomplete translation), Portuguese and Spanish.
5. Screen saver. We didn’t install it, but judging by its size, it includes a video with a game announcement and a player.
6. An installer for the ancient QuickTime player, which has been out of support for a long time, and almost any modern video player is now enough to play videos in mov format.
7. Service files: something in Flash, a library for supporting programs in the Visual Basic 6.0 language. Well, the file “readme.txt”.
Studied disk: АlехeyMS
Special thanks to @HP_Archivist and his colleagues for their efforts in finding old materials.
A disk image with the most complete version of the materials can be found here.