Gaming Windows 7 Games Compatibility Testing

Did anyone but me notice the "Waiting" part in the above post lol , seriously though Duke Nukem Forever was one of the games I wanted to play more than any other! More than 10 years ago though! I don't think it will ever be released now.

 

Have you tried Gothic 3 with any of the community patches? I was thinking about giving this another go when I upgrade (new PC and Win7).

 

The problem with many older games is that although the game itself is 32bit, the *installer* is a 16bit application. The original version of No One Lives Forever is an example of this. I was able to run this under Win7 64 by installing it on an XP (virtual) machine, and then copying the 'No One Lives Forever' Program folder over to the Win7 machine.

 

Have faith! The Duke comes in 2012... around 1min before the tsunamis and earthquakes

And Beyond Good and Evil never worked on my PC... don't know why, but must be my gfx drivers (HD4870 and now 5870)

(sorry for the offtopic)

 

Joe, I have been playing Fallout 2 without problem on Windows 7 RC x64, and just tried booting now on retail and likewise no issues. Not sure why its giving you issues though

 

I've got Rise of Nations installed on Win 7 (RC) and it works fine apart from not updating so can't lan game

 

StarCraft has graphical issues on some systems with Win7 - Weird colours etc.

Playing the game with the desktop/display properties window open in the background cures the problem for some.
Alternatively, using a Launcher (such as the Chaos Launcher) and running the game in windowed mode also solves the problem.
Beware, however, that Launchers are frowned upon by Blizzard and have a very slight chance of causing trouble with Battle.net

Some older games simply require that they're run as administrator, rather than relying on compatibility modes.

All in all I haven't had much trouble running anything on Windows 7, except for those games which also had trouble running properly on XP or modern hardware in general (such as System Shock 2, Thief 1 & 2, etc), but I've successfully used the same workarounds for those as we were using back on XP.

Not sure why you had trouble with Fallout 2 either - F1, F2 & Tactics all run fine for me on Win7 64-bit.

The same goes for JK2 Jedi Outcast, I've been playing that just fine too - As well as Soldier of Fortune II (The same GHOUL II version of the Q3A engine) and Q3A itself (via Steam).

Specs of my Win7-64bit rig are in my sig. Using the latest of all drivers.

 

Hm - interesting. I do know that there are a bunch of different memory and HDD errors that can come from running the Fallout games on modern systems. Still, I can only report what I saw. If I can make time I'll look into it some more.

 

You need to re-title this article "Win 7 compatibility testing with games no one plays anymore"
To differentiate it from the soon to come article that is actually useful "Win 7 games compatibility"

Dune and Deus Ex?!?!? C'mon guys, let Deus Ex (pries it from their cold dead hands). Games older than 3 years are pretty irrelevant, because we have (usually) moved on to bigger and clearer things.

Yours in Futuristic DX11 Plasma,
Star*Dagger

P.S. Let the "I will upgrade to Win7 when sp1 comes out" tirades begin!
P.P.S. /me Goes to store to buy 2 copies of ultimate win7

 

umm....hello....

forget gta4 of course thats gonna work....

Someone tell me about gta SA, gta VC, gta III

If you don't, i'll steal your car, and drive around looking for something, for HOURS!

 

I think that most everything that worked on Vista will work with Win 7.

 

what about testing those games that had opengl problem with ati graphics card and see if that changes things, it might well be nvidia spesfic

 

The issue with the original Beyond Good & Evil is that at the end of the installation it attempts to install a copy protection driver, under 64-bit systems this causes setup to fail reverting all changes made, the Steam and GOG versions don't suffer from this due to the copy protection not being included. Otherwise I've found Win 7 to have good compatibility with most of my older games, at least on par with Vista

 

Prey on Windows 7 64-bit

Prey on Windows 7 64-bit

Install: OK

Launched but then crashed after about 10 seconds with an OpenGL error. Tried Windows XP compatibility but still crashed. Turned off compatibility and then it seemed to work OK.

Perhaps it had to do something which XP compatibility allowed it to do which got it working.

 

I had a problem with Neverwinter Nights 2. Apparently it uses OpenGL but uses the Direct X version checker to check the hardware requirements. Because of this it was saying the Direct X version was out of date and not allowing the game to continue. In the end I found the answer on the Obsidian Forums (The game developers) it involves copying one of the direct X files from either Vista or XP (I used XP) and the game then runs fine.

Maybe this is also the workaround for other OpenGL games like Quake Wars.

1) You need "dxdiagn.dll" from Windows Vista or Windows XP. It can be found in system32 directory (For example, C:\Windows\System32). This file is part of directX redistributable, so you can download it without breaking any copyrights.
2) Find "dxdiagn.dll" in your Windows 7 system32 directory and take ownership on it. Rename it for "dxdiagn.dll.old".
3) Copy Vista's "dxdiagn.dll" to Windows 7 system32 directory.

If you want it working for a x64 system do the same steps as above but for the folder c:\windows\sysWOW64\ instead of system32

I've had problems trying to take ownership on the dxdiagn.dll file. I solved it with this file: http://www.blogsdna.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/takeownership.zip

It adds a contextual menu right-clicking on the file, then, you can easily get ownership on it. After that, you can delete, move or change it for another one. I changed only the one in the system32 folder.
In this zip file, there are 2 .reg files, one adds contextual menu, and the other is for get off that option, if you want. It automatically adds the entry to the registry - ignore the warning. It is very useful for getting at locked files.

Hope this all helps.

 

Bully for you that you can afford 2 copies or even three in a family pack. Why shouldn't everyone else wait, and not just for sp1? I was personally waiting for the confirmation of 64-Bit in the same box as 32, which was unclear until it launched. Also, wanting 64-Bit, I want extra RAM in the machine since I'm only really playing with 7 on this current PC - I'll move it to the next build where it will be the only OS, for older boxes they can stay on XP. So there's loads of reasons why people didn't go to PC World at midnight to buy 7, it's the new thing, but it's three months to Christmas - will check post-Xmas pricing as some other deals might come up.

 

Hey guys, i've read through the threads and replies, but on which version of Windows do games run best? ie, same hardware, latest drivers but different versions of windows. essentially, which version of windows give best framerate?!

 

X3: Reunion and X3: Terran Conflict both work without problems on Win 7 as long as you use the latest patches that remove the TAGES copy protection.

 

I've had Win7 Pro 64bit off MSDN-AA for a few weeks now. Haven't tried too many oldish games so no worries here. I did manage to get the original Metal Gear Solid game to work by applying the Vista fixed executables That's nice since my mate has been harassing me to play that game for ages and I just decided to do that now. Shame Jedi Outcast doesn't run I was planning on replaying that at some point.

 

ET:QW does in fact run on Win 7, atleast my copy that I bought via Steam does. I did have to manually install some MS 2005 C++ redistrabutable (it errored on install) and Punkbuster. Once done I could play online and have had no issues, other than what I think is my 9800GX2 starting to die.