Best ways to make XP compatible with older games?

[ManDooM]

There's Windows compatability mode and some third-party apps that make it possible. But what's the most stable way (besides dual booting) to get win98 and 95 games to play without interfering with normal operation?

I'm thinking specifically of games like Daggerfall, Quake, Command and Conquer, Dungeon Keeper, and Populous: The Beginning. Maybe even earlier, like Monkey Island.

 

[BlueWeasel]

Well, the best way IMHO would be to just see how the game runs without using compatability mode or 3rd-party apps. I have several older games that run fine in XP without having to do anything (GLQuake runs great in XP)

Be sure and check out NT Compatible if there are particular games you are having problems with

 

[gaidin123]

For the older games you could try vmware or virtualpc and actually install Win95 or whatever on those VMs and run the games. It would probably be crap for any 3d games but I'd bet 2d ones would run pretty well.

For 3d, I'd definitely look after projects such as GLQuake as BlueWeasel said. Those projects are a godsend for people wanting to play old 3d games with new hardware/software. They generally take advantage of some newer graphical features to make things smoother, scale better, etc.

Compatibility mode might also work. Just trying it in XP may work. I've replayed Freespace2 a couple times and though there are some graphical glitches in the menu systems now the game still plays flawlessly (and it's still great ). Of course that game is much more recent than those that you mentioned.

Gaidin

 

[Malak]

I installed a game that no joke, defaults to 320x200 or something resolution. That's how old it was. It ran perfectly fine in XP. I haven't had any problems.

 

[Zelmo3]

I've never heard of a problem with 32-bit games running in XP.
For DOS games, try running them straight from XP's command prompt. If that doesn't work, use DosBox. You'll lose a little performance, but it works like magic.

 

[imported_Kiwi]

Originally posted by: Zelmo3
(Snip!) If that doesn't work, use DosBox. You'll lose a little performance, but it works like magic.

When you look at the differences in the hardware that we used when DOS games were still being played, something like DOSbox could eat 60-70% of the operating cycles and we would still have more reserve left to run the old games than the PC's of that era could produce. Just think how slow a 100 MHz *anything* is/was. DOS games were no longer being produced by the time 200 MHz processors even existed, let alone became affordable for ordinary users.

Now, we can put together a 1 1/2 GHz clunker from spare parts in the junk closet, or if new, for less than $300 worth of bits, and it has *15 times* as much speed as the old DOS stuff did. So we end up adding "Mo- Slow" or the equivalent, to eat still more of the excess cycles!

 

[drag]

I like Doxbox. Use it in Linux, too.

Also if you want to play around with this stuff you can use Bochs

Now to understand what Bochs is, it's a x86 computer emulator.

Now to understand what that means look at three other peices of software:Wine, DoxBox, and Vmware.

Wine is not a emulator. It is a implimentation of the Win32 API for Linux. Your running programs natively in Linux as if Linux was Windows. It's not nearly as nice as running Windows programs in Windows, but it works and it allows most Windows programs to be crossplatform.

DosBox emulates a Dos operating system, not a computer. It's a approximation of Dos.

VMWare provides hardware abstraction so that multiple OSes can run with relatively high speed. It has it's own special drivers and such.

Now Bochs emulates a entire PC.
The CPU is emulated in software,
It has it's own BIOS, it has it's own Video BIOS.
It emulates a vid card.
Floppies are emulated
harddrives are emulated
Cdroms are emulated.

All very slow, but very neat. You actually can run MS DOS in it, or versions of Windows. Win95 would be a good OS to try in it, and people have even got Windows 2000 working on it.

Personally I've run a slimed down version of Win98 on my laptop in full emulation hosted in a Linux OS. Some games that won't work in DosBox, will work for Bochs, but most games will run too slowly.