This is topic Running older games on Windows XP in forum Film-Yak at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.


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Posted by Michael Schaffer (Member # 1204) on 06-11-2007, 09:42 PM:
 
I tried to run an old Windows 3.1/95 game ("Warhammer - Shadow of the Horned Rat" probably one of the greatest game titles ever) on my Windows XP MCE. But that didn't work at all. It didn't even want to install.

I googled for some tips and found quite a few. Some just involved editing the .ins file (which helped only one step further as it defeated the OS and DirectX checks but the install still wouldn't run). Some went much further, very detailed instructions on how to copy the files from the CD, where to put them, what registry editings to edit etcetc., but those tips didn't really get me any further either.
I found an installer package which included the entire game (I have the original on CD though) with a rewritten install routine, and that actually worked. It installed the game, apparently more or less cleanly, and it actually ran, with sound and videos and and menus and all. But then when I started the first mission, another setback: The game has a 2D control surface with buttons to click on and a minimap in one corner, and about the upper left quarter of the screen was supposed to display a zoom- and rotateable 3D view of the battle field (screenshots here) . But that 3D window was just totally black. The original 3D views were not some kind of hardware specific standard (like 3dfx or some of the other stuff they had during the mid-late 90s), but apparently software rendered 3D with some hardware accelerated options.

Then I downloaded MS Virtual PC from the MS website (amazingly, that is free), set up a virtual machine, installed Windows 98 on that (I didn't have a Windows 95 disc anymore), installed the game on that virtual machine - no problems -, ran it, and it actually works. Videos, menus, 2D and 3D views, sound, everything works.

I am wondering why it worked in Virtual PC but not when I installed the game directly into XP since the graphics adpater is still the same, obviously. I thought that the graphics adapter simply didn't support the kind of pixel rendering 3D that was employed here anymore. That is a "known problem" with the game's successor "Dark Omen". It simply works on some modern graphics adapters, and on some it simply doesn't.

Yet the 3D mode in "Horned Rat" didn't work directly under XP at all, not even with all hardware acceleration options (goraud shading, lighting, textures) turned off, and all these options do work under Virtual PC.

Installing Virtual PC and an older OS is quite a lot of effort - I mostly just pursued that because I found it interesting, running that game is not that important for me, so I wonder if there are simpler and more compact emulators which help people run older games under XP?
 

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Posted by Joel N. Weber II (Member # 3530) on 06-11-2007, 10:09 PM:
 
Sometimes software relies on subtle behavior of the OS which was never documented, and which changes in later versions of the OS. Microsoft apparently has invested a lot of effort in backwards compatibility in operating systems through XP, though, so it's a little surprising that that doesn't run directly under XP; perhaps it is too obscure for them to have tested that game.

Virtual PC is competing with software such as VMware (some versions of which are also zero dollars) and Xen (where the basic software is free as in both beer and speech, although Xensource sells a commercial version). I use virtual machines running on both VMware and Xen just about every day, and a certain amount of my day job involves maintaining VMware hosts; I have no experience using Virtual PC. It might be difficult for Virtual PC to get much market share if it wasn't zero dollars, and Virtual PC may also be part of the backwards compatibility strategy for Vista.
 

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Posted by Marc Hansen (Member # 705) on 06-11-2007, 10:52 PM:
 
Try this-
Right click on the icon or the program name in the programs menu,click on the compatibility tab, and set it to run in w95 or whatever mode you want to try.
Marc
 

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Posted by Monte L Fullmer (Member # 2797) on 06-11-2007, 10:54 PM:
 
..could be a display issue...

I've played old DOS games and run LOTUS 2.3 for DOS on my laptop here using XP-PROsp2, but I have a shortcut on my desktop that enables the DOS kernel hidden within Windows..
 

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Posted by Michael Schaffer (Member # 1204) on 06-11-2007, 10:58 PM:
 
Marc - Duh! Of course that was the very first thing I tried. And do you think those fairly complex strategies I only briefly outlined above didn't take that into account? I was wondering how long it would take for somebody to say that. But it is pretty obvious that the problem here is much more complex. Or was, since the VirtualPC solution solved the problem. But I am still interested to learn more about the background here.

Monte - what do you mean by display issue? It works with the same graphics card and display in Virtual PC, but not under XP. And don't you think you are a little too old to play computer games?
 

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Posted by Damien Taylor (Member # 4255) on 06-12-2007, 12:51 AM:
 
The graphics emulated by VPC is usually nothing like your hosts, the last time I used it, it emulated an S3 Trio or some other god awful old card, with its subsequent 4MB.

I use both VMWare and VPC often, but i will check out this XEN. Its a lot of fun to run "dead" os' as legacy software. ie, a heavy investment in os/2 software . I even managed to get IRC running on 3.1 somehow, it took me all night but meh.
 

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Posted by Chris Slycord (Member # 4239) on 06-12-2007, 02:56 AM:
 
Most likely it's the fact that old DOS/Windows games would use hardware-related interrupts to directly write to the hardware itself. But with Windows XP, those same interrupts are no longer accessible for security reasons. Pretty much anything with direct hardware access isn't allowed anymore and instead the OS only lets you get the same kind of access through some higher-level, OS-controlled method.

And the reason VPC worked is it maps those interrupts to what XP wants you to do for the same results.
 

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Posted by Monte L Fullmer (Member # 2797) on 06-12-2007, 03:12 AM:
 

quote: Michael Schaffer

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And don't you think you are a little too old to play computer games?

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