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Windows 95/98 games on XP

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  • 29-08-2007 9:36pm
    #1
    CCCP^
    Closed Accounts Posts: 1,749 ✭✭✭


    Heleuw,

    I have recently found a bunch of old PC games like Carmageddon, Unreal, Duke Nukem 3D etc and was overjoyed, but it turns out these games won't run properly. They install and load but then fail to run. I'm not very technical, and i tried looking this up but ive read people doing wierd things with drives and other stuff that makes alot of sense to most people but is greek to me. So does anyone out there now how to run older PC games on XP? Is there like an emulator or is that a stupid question?

    Thanks for any help,

    Signed - Stoopid.


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    #2
    tman
    Closed Accounts Posts: 16,339 ✭✭✭✭tman


    right click on the shortcut that you use to run the game, go to properties and then click on the compatability tab. try setting the compatability mode to windows 98/me or something and seeing if that makes a difference.

    Carmageddon and DN3D were both dos based games with poor 95/98 compatability, so you might have a bit more trouble getting those working than you would with Unreal...

    DN3D would prolly run nicely on dosbox (a dos emulator), but Carmageddon was a bit more processor intensive... might be worth giving it a shot though


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    #3
    koneko
    Registered Users Posts: 10,304 ✭✭✭✭koneko


    Indeed, and it's not a stupid question, getting some old games running on XP can be a headache and a half.

    For some games compatibility mode should do just fine, for others you might need to do more but do a search for the game's name and XP and it should bring up relevant hits (usually threads on other forums).

    For Carmageddon, check if your CD has a Win95 folder, that should contain a file called Carma95.exe you can try


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    #4
    Cravez
    Registered Users Posts: 3,031 ✭✭✭Cravez


    ^^ What T-man said about changing the compatibility to Windows 95/98. In some cases that will make the game run, however some games can be a right pain in the arse and still not run. About 2-3 of my old games that i still currently play iv had to google around trying to find solutions, usually id type " XP Problems with *insert game name here* " and you will find other threads or forums on how to fix the game. Of those 2-3 games iv had to download patches that users themselves designed to run on XP or i had to go through downloading a few Ms-Dos type programs to get the game running.

    Edit: Koneko bet me to it :D


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    #5
    Mr. Presentable
    Closed Accounts Posts: 9,496 ✭✭✭Mr. Presentable


    DN3D has a High Res Pack with XP compatability which you should try.

    http://hrp.duke4.net/download.php

    Fan-bloody-tastic, mate


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    #6
    Mr. Presentable
    Closed Accounts Posts: 9,496 ✭✭✭Mr. Presentable


    There's also a prog called Dosbox you could try which emulates DOS (surprisingly) and there's a thread in these here parts about it.

    http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055095412

    http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/news.php?show_news=1


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    #7
    Kevster
    Closed Accounts Posts: 2,980 ✭✭✭Kevster


    Yeh, DOS-Box is the best as far as I am concerned. Plus, there is a neat program called D-Fend that runs on top of DOS-Box. D-Fend is a GUI; DOS-Box is purely command-line.


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    #8
    Reku
    Registered Users Posts: 3,766 ✭✭✭Reku


    If nothing else ever made me dispise Microsoft as a corporation this does, hate the way I can't give into nostalgia and go back to play old games I have without having to spend the best part of a day tracking down, implementing and optimising ways to make them run.:mad:


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    #9
    wayne040576
    Registered Users Posts: 1,496 ✭✭✭wayne040576


    farohar wrote:
    If nothing else ever made me dispise Microsoft as a corporation this does, hate the way I can't give into nostalgia and go back to play old games I have without having to spend the best part of a day tracking down, implementing and optimising ways to make them run.:mad:

    You can't really blame microsoft for this issue. They have spent a lot more time and effort than they really needed to making older apps run on new versions of windows. It's one of the reasons so many of the old problems have been kept on the new versions of the os. It's ridiculous to expect old dos based games to run properly on XP. There are many other valid reasons not to like MS.

    Here's an example of some of the things they have done in the past:

    from the article:

    http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html

    I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it.

    This was not an unusual case...


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