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Blogs Games I Wish Worked on Vista

Discussion in 'Article Discussion' started by Sifter3000, 12 May 2009.

  1. Sifter3000

    Sifter3000 I used to be somebody

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  2. Krikkit

    Krikkit All glory to the hypnotoad! Super Moderator

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    Dual-boot a Windows 98 or XP installation? That way you can get the urge, reboot and install to an OS that actually makes the game work instead of fiddling about. :)
     
  3. faugusztin

    faugusztin I *am* the guy with two left hands

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    Sorry Joe, but you are knocking on wrong doors. Really, who is the one to blame ? MS, who is making the OS with public API, or the ones who created the game using millions of different hacks, expectations etc etc. If those games fail, it usually means problem like Y2K - i expect that some non-public thing is there, and that damn MS removed that non-public thing from later versions. Or they have problems with PAE - but that is not MS fault again, it's the fault of game programmer who expected that memory will never be bigger than 3GB... And we can continue, but the point is - if the game fails, you can be sure that game is at fault in 99% of cases.
     
  4. liratheal

    liratheal Sharing is Caring

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    *coughwindows7trythatcough*

    Hell, I got RA working on Windows 7 yesterday. The colours were a bit off, but hell, it was playable.

    Or what Krikkit suggested.
     
  5. phuzz

    phuzz This is a title

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    Or a VM, VMWare player or Server is free and works, and if you can find an old Win98 setup disk lying around.
    That said I'm sure there's some Win98 VMs floating around the internets, not that any of us would do something that naughty...
     
  6. tidu

    tidu What's a Dremel?

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    Grim fandango is working in Vista (64bit too), you just need the "Grim fandango setup" from http://quick.mixnmojo.com/grim-fandango-setup and imagecfg.exe (run "IMAGECFG.EXE -a 0x1 GRIMFANDANGO.EXE") to make it work on multi core CPUs.
     
  7. NikoBellic

    NikoBellic Tech Addict

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    Dual Boot! (Vista x64 & XP x86)
     
  8. sear

    sear Guest

    Not to advertise, but Good Old Games has dozens of classic games (albeit not so much the ones you've mentioned) that are reprogrammed to work properly on Vista, XP and presumably Windows 7 once it's out, plus they come with tons of features. Not quite the same as using your old disc, but hey, if it works, it works.
     
  9. delriogw

    delriogw What's a Dremel?

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    i join the chorus of dual boot.

    for me it's xp x32 and vista x64

    because i have xp on my system, it allows me to run stuff as if in xp, but should that fail, i can just hop over to my other drive and bingo

    my main problem was one of my favourite games doesn't work with pgi-e gfx cards - even the games makers can't figure it out
     
  10. el_diablo_72

    el_diablo_72 What's a Dremel?

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    I know the feeling though - Dark Omen and Warhammer 40,000 Chaos Gate - absolutely marvelous but a swine to get running. I managed Dark Omen but I need to keep an old windows 95 laptop for Chaos Gate and that is getting a bit bust!
     
  11. Dead Ghost

    Dead Ghost What's a Dremel?

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    No easy solution for this. And a VM of Win98, like someone suggested, doesn't work for all games. The best solution is to have an old pc with AGP video card and Win 98 on it.
     
  12. Cptn-Inafinus

    Cptn-Inafinus Minimodder

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    In relation to the quicksave joke. Just yesterday in English my friend went to me "Do you remember quicksave?" as in the hideous old super market. I terrifyingly quickly replied "Yeah, it's normally F5 or F6."

    I make my self die some days.
     
  13. barack

    barack What's a Dremel?

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    its not a fault of windows vista, its a rare case when fault is on OS.And if it was in OS then definately an update would have solved it.
     
  14. Aragon Speed

    Aragon Speed Busily modding X3: Terran Conflict

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    I am old enough to remember this problem with the change to XP from 98. And to those who say it is the fault of games programmers and not the OS developer, rubbish. 50% of most games would not run in XP at the time, and of those that did, another 5-10% crashed. A lot.

    MS know what games are out there, and that the customer has spent a fortune on buying them. With the swap to XP I lost about £2000 because of games that would simply no longer work. (Before I used the solution I mention below to recover most of them into a playable state.)

    The swap to Vista is not as drastic as the swap to XP was, but a lot of games that should work do not.

    With XP it was the removal of a true DOS environment that caused a large chunk of the problems, with Vista is it another underlying problem. But the problem is still there never-the-less.

    I am not saying those are the only reasons that games do not work under Vista, but fundamental changes to the OS are going to break things.

    This is the price we pay for advancement, and while I understand the need for these changes, it really peeves me the way that MS seem to turn a blind eye to the problems they are going to cause.

    I have no problems with OS changes, even if they stop me playing a game natively in a new OS, but what we should have had is better support for older games/programs with Vista from MS themselves. "Compatibility mode" is really just a joke and a waste of disk space.

    To answer your questions Joe, the only real way around this problem has already been mentioned. Dual-boot XP/Vista, and then for really old 98 games use the free Microsoft VM software loaded on the XP side, and then load a copy of 98 onto it. With this set up I have managed to keep about 95% of all my games playable.
     
  15. faugusztin

    faugusztin I *am* the guy with two left hands

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    You didn't got it, Aragon... Yes, there are fundamental changes. No, it's not because of those changes - it's because those games uses bad, bad programming. Those games usually expect OS to behave in specific way, which isn't allways the case. If they use unclean programming methods (common when you program games and try to maximize performance), then they usually have problems when something doesn't work the way they expected - multiple cores, PAE, DEP, 64-bit enviroment or other changes all can make their previous assumption incorrect, thus game starts to fail, because something is not where it expected to be, or doesn't behave as they expected.

    No, you can't make compatibility mode for hacks, because it's impossible. How do you want to make something compatible if it reads/writes something outside of their address space (DEP, PAE, 64-bit), uses some obsolete non-public method (those are not supported, no intented for public use - and sorry, MS doesn't have to check every damn software on this planet), also they can't support forever something they deprecated 10-15 years ago (or would you like to have a 80GB Windows installation for Windows after W7?)...

    As i said, in 99% of cases the fault is at the game, better said on game developer. Why mostly only games and software using drivers have compatibility issues ? In case of drivers it's understandable, in case of games not.
     
  16. Grimloon

    Grimloon What's a Dremel?

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    It doesn't really matter whose fault it is, the fact that things simply don't work is the problem. Th game developers write for what the principle OS of the time is, the OS developers are always trying to create new. They can't always meet in the middle happily as sometimes a game is a bit of a kludge, sometimes the OS has to drop a certain degree of backward compatibility.

    However, I do get frustrated by the urge to play old games periodically and Grim Fandango is right up there on the list. I think I feel a bit of tinkering to see if I can get it running on Win 7 is in order...
     
  17. Jux_Zeil

    Jux_Zeil What's a Dremel?

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    Has anyone used DOSbox? I find it very good for running the old games. If you're in need of a little nostalgic trip then all it takes is a bit of MSDOS knowledge and you good to go. Other than that I find that Vista Ultimate runs most XP games in compatibility mode. Ive even got Final Fantasy VII Ultimate to run without crashing.
     
  18. Blademrk

    Blademrk Why so serious?

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    I had problems runnig Titan Quest on vista, seems it was expecting a particular Direct X file which isn't part of Microsoft's latest DX version (and wouldn't install the file from the disk as my Dx version was greater than the on-disk version).

    I had a quick search round the developers website and there was a workround mentioned in the forums (the thread wasn't easily found, and didn't include a link to the needed file - which means more searching), but by that point I had just about given up.

    I was running a dual boot system (XP) at the time, so Instead of figuring out exactly what I needed to do to get it running in vista I switched to the other OS.

    I haven't tried to get it running in W7 yet (now that I'm not running a dual boot) but I'm not hopeful.
     
  19. javaman

    javaman May irritate Eyes

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    lol I understand what you mean. Ive had the desire to play deus ex recently too. Also I recently got timeshift to find it isn't compataible with vista 64 =( TBH I dont really blame the OS or designers tho. Things change and companies have to spend time on what the majority wants. I feel the same about BC ps3's. Ive a huge collection of ps2 and ps1 games.....but I still have a ps1 and ps2 to play them on.
     
  20. salesman

    salesman What's a Dremel?

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    Does anyone know how to get AVP 1 to work on a xp system?
     
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