Adventures in PC Gaming: Software Not Compatible

[Bob_Bobbington]

I tried to run an old windows 95 game called Incoming on XP. Well apparently I have no graphics card according to this game.

Also Age of Empires saying over 120GB is NOT enough room for a 500MB game. I call bullshit on this logic.

 

[scott91575]

Grim Fandango and Windows 7 didn't play too well together.

 

[More Fun To Compute]

Playing older games is a pain and old windows games are sometimes harder to get running properly than emulated software for really obscure systems. I actually have an old laptop that it still running windows 98 but I don't use that often. I'm also still on XP as I don't see the benefits in Vista and 7 that compensate for losing old software.

There are a few web resources that can help like the Vogons forum and the WineHQ that has a database of software that is known to run well with the Wine software under Linux. (And anything else that has a Wine port, I guess.) Last time I played Fallout was on Ubuntu as it ran with less hassle and fewer issues.

 

[SextusMaximus]

When I was young, my dorling kindersley learning game wouldn't work on WIndows XP.

What on Earth is Dorling Kindersley? Odds are, it isn't as awesome as Zoombinis was.

Which reminds me, Zoombinis and Oregon Trail 4 don't work on Vista either. I'll have to try 7, maybe it'll let me play them this time...[/quote]

It's a company which specialises in Encyclopedias and such, a learning game came with an encyclopedia about world geography for 6 or 7 year olds.

In hindsight, I'm rather glad it didn't work.

 

[Spectrum_Prez]

I can't play Far Cry 1, KOTOR or Vietcong on Vista.
I'm going to cry in the corner now..

I got both FarCry and KOTOR to run on my vista machine just fine, its not an OS problem, probably a driver or hardware incompatibility. Now Thief 3, on the other hand, just plain out cannot run because of the way your Documents folder is set up differently from in XP, which it was very tightly written for. No other game has that level of stupidity.

Beyond Good and Evil, which is old enough that my machine should make supporting it a non-issue, had crazy graphical glitches all over the place, wild rainbows and dancing colours running all over the screen. It gave me a headache so I ended up giving up on that admittedly fun game.

 

[ChocoFace]

Got Borderlands for PC, installed it, tried playing it, but the god damn windows bluescreen decided i didn't deserve to play it.
I need to get a new computer...

 

[Sevre]

snip

I'm sure you can patch Myst to run on your OS. Thats the way it works for most old games.

 

[Nmil-ek]

I can't play Far Cry 1, KOTOR or Vietcong on Vista.
I'm going to cry in the corner now..

Theres a community patch on filefront to fix Kotor on vista as simple as dropping a file into the overide directory unless you bought it off steam in which case, hah hah.

 

[ActionDan]

Well. This isn't crazy, but back when I was on my parents PC because it was the best PC in the house at the time, but it still had a crappy graphics card, so I was running Counter-Strike source and Half Life 2 in a small window with all the textures turned down and such. Then we had a new graphics card and I had some more games to play (The Orange Box) and it was AWESOME. I could run it so much better with better looking scenery and shit, and I was amazed. Then I had a custom built PC made a year later, and it is even more awesome. 19 btw, and this was spread over 2 years.

 

[Beltaine]

WARNING: Good old days content incoming!

Back in the day, gaming on a PC required this much effort if not more for EVERY new game you tried to play.

A game would want Extended memory, or Expanded memory, or want 600k of base memory free. (Which was practically all of it.

You'd have to fiddle around with config.sys and autoexec.bat files in a text editor and make custom boot discs to run individual games. Most every game required a complete system reboot using a boot disc before you could run it.

You damn kids don't realize how easy you have it these days!

 

[teh_gunslinger]

Dragon Age: Origins
It takes 3 different login/password combinations to use all the features of this game. Which would be a hassle but alright, if it were clear what they were.

Installed -> You need an EA master account. Created one. Logging to EA masteraccount provides a javascript popup over the EA masteraccount login to login to your bioware account. I thought I had none, cancelled, looked for where to create one. Gone there, tried to sign up. I couldn't, my email adress was already in use. Ah, I remember, I tried to sign up for SW:TOR beta.

Grep'd through my mail, found it. Signed into EA masteraccount, tried to sign in to bioware account. One general message "This username/password combination is incorrect". I assumed for half an hour the system meant my bioware account. Looked for ways to retrieve password on the web, reset it, tried again. Did not work. Finally I doubled checked my EA masteraccount login credentials. Made a typo there. Thanks for stating exactly which login failed (2 logins on one page with one error message, great idea). Logged in, finally working.

Started the game. CE DLC not working. Browsed for an answer. Found a looooooong thread on the bioware forums on google, could not access the forum thread, needs a new login. Created one. Read the thread, tried everything, found out that the updater service (WTF, why does a single game need an updater *service* which are meant for system relevant services). Started the service manually (start is on "automatic"). Have to start the service manually every time I want to play.

I have more examples: Steam, GTA4 (PC). I am frustrated as hell with PC gaming currently. Last time, I took a break from PC gaming for 2 years and switched over to XBox360. DAO makes me want to go back.

Oh, man! I had the same problems with the updater service. Any game that requires me to manually start shit in services.msc just to be working on release is a fail in my eyes. For shame, Bioware, making a broken piece of crap. And what's up with the bajillion different logins just to play the damn thing? It's unintuitive and bad design.

Bioware lost a lot of credibility with me after Dragon Age. It simply is not working. I have no issues messing around and modding old games to get them running, but Dragon Age is NOT an old game.

I didn't even mind messing with EMS and so forth back in the DOS days and juggling drivers in autoexec.bat and config.sys so it wouldn't load the cd-rom drivers and giving me more memory. That was part of the game. But Bioware should know better. And for a game that was so much hyped on release day DLC to boot. Oh, well, I still have my Baldur's Gate games so I can pretend they never made new stuff.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

I'd love to know how your dad got it to work on WinXP, because I picked up Myst Masterpiece collection off Ebay a while back and it won't run on my computer which has XP. All I get is a black screen with what sounds like wind. I wanted to try it after playing Myst on the DS, which sucks due to lack of mouse pointer.

 

[shaboinkin]

Games for Windows live

Lets just say that the was worst nightmare I have ever endured just to play the game...no matter a fact, let me say what happened

Bought red faction guerrilla off of steam. Them it started to install games for windows live. I already knew shit was bout to go down due to past experiences with it. Started the game up, had to put in some account info to log in to SAVE THE EFFING GAME. Really? Since when did i have to log in to an outside source to save a game? What kind of sense does that make? Anyways I had an old account with them and decided to use it. I really forgot what happened after that but it took over an hour to get the account working. THEN!!! It had to install a patch. OK cool. Patch takes effin hours to download (my internet has a pretty decent connection speed) THEN it tells me that the patch won't download. THEN for some reason my account locks up.

I use the power of google to learn that I could use an offline account to save my game. THANK GOD! I quickly set that account up and started the game up, only to be disappointed with the horrible sound bug and some slowness in the game due to lack of optimization.

I then create a new online account to try to get the pact again. Same problems as above. I look online to manually patch it only to be disappointed again to learn that even though I got all the files I need to patch the game, Stupid shit Game of Windows Live needs to poke its head in and require that it be used to patch the game. That is plagued of errors. Which after googling for hours did I learn that I (meaning ME, the CONSUMER WHO SHOULDN'T HAVE TO FIX THE FAULTS OF MICROSHIT) had to go into my registry and create one stupid registry key MY EFFING SELF. That stupid ass shit fixed all my problems...

This whole process took hours to fix over the span of 2 days.

Great game...worst experience I have ever had to endure just to get a game to work I MY LIFE.

Games for Windows Live needs to die a slow painful death...scratch that, I quick one so I don't got to deal with it anymore.

/rant
/small wall o text

 

[tomtom94]

I'm still only on XP, I haven't really had problems with backwards compatibility. Actually that's not true, Lego Island Xtreme Stunts used to crash on me whenever I tried to play it. That and Age of Wonders II used to hate being shut down. Every time I clicked quit I got a blue screen.

I spent two years with 98 though, and apparently the OS isn't THAT necessary for a game to work. Just sometimes (like Trackmania glitching and flashing white stripes across the screen constantly). However I was able to make Command and Conquer: Generals work, on a PC that only ran 98. I was pleased with that...

 

[blackjaw1]

For the NT mystery, 7 is based on the NT Kernel as XP and Vista were.

As for getting that to run, I honestly couldn't tell you. I haven't had trouble with anything I've wanted to run on my machines (I have a laptop with XP for really old stuff). Deus Ex doesn't like my dual core processor on my laptop, which is an easy fix but I'm lazy so I gave up on it. The only thing I've not been able to run correctly is Resident Evil. 7 has played pretty nicely with everything I've thrown at it so far.

 

[Richard Hannay]

After attempts on my PC (via the actual game discs), on the BootCamp partition of my Mac (via GameTap), my girlfriends PC (via GameTap), and the OSX partition of my Mac (via a Cider-ized version of the game) all failed to yield a playable result, I've concluded that I will never be able to play Silent Hill 2 ever again. (All the Windows machines in this story are running XP.)

My beloved Mac OS 9-and-earlier games, particularly Riven and Deus Ex, are beyond my reach as well.