i know this may be a stupid question but surely there is a way to get xp games to work on win 7? I have been on the microsft website compatability thingy, and the games that i used to play and love i.e. carmageddon, C&C Red Alert, unreal e.t.c., it says that they are not compatible for the 64 bit system. Is there a way to get these to work or is that it never to work again? thanks andy (t4n6o)
Depends a lot on the game. Most of them will work with compatibility mode set to xp and/or run as admin. Some game require more steps like 3rd party file replacements. If its old enough to be 16bit you'll need to use something like dosbox or Windows 9x in a virtual machine.
i have some old games that i cant get to run on windows 7 ultra 64 namely mechwarrior 4 vengence the black night add on and mercenaries i was getting a memory error the games all worked in 32 bit win 7 ultra just not in 64
If you have the Windows 7 Professional, Ultimate or Enterprise editon, you can download the Windows XP Mode, which is basically a Virtual-PC VM. You can dl it HERE at Microsoft. If you don't want that, you can always download Oracle's VirtualBox and setup a Windows XP VM, if your system has the resources and you have an old copy of WinXP lying around.
I know a lot of older games have problems if you install to the 'Program Files' directory -- even fairly newish ones like Fallout 3.
I've not had any games refuse to work on Win7 x64 that I used to play on XP x32. Maybe I've just been lucky. However, I always change the default install location, each games has it's own named folder. i.e. c:\UT or c:\Red Alert, etc.
Its game dependant some you are lucky some you are not, i have tried virtual box for some of my games installing windows xp onto a virtual pc...once again some games like it, others did not mostly surrounding hardware issues and games not working because of them. Easiest way around it is to build a 2nd budget gaming pc with old tech and load windows xp onto it...or just give up some of the older games you have.
