[kalnaren]

I wouldn't expect XP to be compatable with W95/98 games, since XP and 9x are completely different operating systems.

Sometimes. Most Windows 9x games can be made to work eventually.

This makes no sense. You don't expect them to work, even though most of them do work?

How does it not make sense? I don't expect older Win95 games to work in XP. Just because, more often than not, they can be made to work doesn't mean I expect them to.

Take Total Annihilation for example. It's an older game that, off install, will not work in an XP environment. An updated patch is required. This is a game that 'can be made to work' relatively easily, thankfully. But I would not expect a game of its age to, by default, natively run in XP.

Go back even further. Look at pre-win95 games. A lot of those older DOS games were designed to run as fast as possible instead of keep a constant tic rate, and thus run far to quickly in Windows. They can be made to work properly -but I don't install a 15 year old game and expect it to work 100%.

There are no major inherent differences between the 32-bit programs and XP can run those fine without using NTVDM or anything like that. In fact, I have never seen a "native" XP program.

I believe I stated something about 16-bit and 8-bit programs earlier.

I've also had problems where older games don't detect modern RAM or SATA hard drives.

There are some old games that don't see the full amount of memory, but it's usually irrelevant since they would never use all of it anyway. They are still detecting more than they actually need. As for the SATA drives, what game does that occur in? That shouldn't really be an issue in Windows games, since they see the drives only through the OS.

TIE Fighter always gives me a stack overflow error, which is the error that program kicks out when it doesn't have enough memory.

You seem to be assuming I'm 100% talking about windows native games. Some of us still have games around from the DOS days . DOS programs sometimes used the BIOS instead of the operating system for hardware identification. Anyone who has tried to get sound in an old DOS game running a soundcard with an IRQ higher than 7 has probably encountered some difficulty with it. This is because the BIOS (or at least older BIOS's) didn't assign sound devices with IRQ's greater than 7. When Windows boots, it reassigns the address to something higher that most DOS programs (or even some Windows 95 programs -the original Dark Forces comes to mind) can't recognise.

I've had issues with some older BIOS chips and SATA detection. Since some DOS programs look for the BIOS address ranges, they won't see the SATA drives. Haven't had this issue with newer BIOS chips, but then again I don't try and run DOS programs natively either. I had this issue a couple of years ago, but I can't remember what game it was.

[CP5670]

How does it not make sense? I don't expect older Win95 games to work in XP. Just because, more often than not, they can be made to work doesn't mean I expect them to.

Then your expectations are too low and are contrary to your own experiences. If it is actually a native Windows game and not just a wrapper for a DOS exe, as some of the earliest Windows games were, there is no fundamental, OS-related reason why it should not work. The only exceptions to this are 16-bit Windows games, which won't work at all on Vista 64 (not 32), but such games were quite rare. Almost all game developers went directly from DOS programs to 32-bit Windows ones.

Take Total Annihilation for example. It's an older game that, off install, will not work in an XP environment. An updated patch is required. This is a game that 'can be made to work' relatively easily, thankfully. But I would not expect a game of its age to, by default, natively run in XP.

If you are referring to the usual 3.1c patch, I wouldn't call that "not working" at all, as it was a general purpose patch that was released long before XP and did many other things. There have been games that wouldn't work unpatched even on the OS and hardware they were designed for, so this isn't saying much. I played TA a lot last summer and know it does not need anything beyond the official patch.

Now the DOS games you mentioned do indeed have a host of problems, but those are not that relevant since we have a very good DOS emulator available that will run all of them properly. There is unfortunately no such thing for Windows games, but there are also far fewer Windows games that would benefit from it.

[Polpolion]

AFAIK, it's easier to make old software work with new hardware than to make new hardware work with old software.

[redsniper]

[Androgeos Exeunt]

Most DOS games don't work very well on OSes beyond ME...and even on ME, they start encountering problems.

[karajorma]

Any program running on ME will encounter problems.

[kalnaren]

Any program running on ME will encounter problems.

+1 to that.

ME is the masochist's operating system.

[Androgeos Exeunt]

kernel32.dll always messes up.

[MR_T3D]

Damn you kernel32.dll

[Nuke]

i find the worst games for modern operating systems are the ones built on directx 5-7, and sometimes dx8 (points at red faction). games based on opel gl for exaple never seem to produce problems. glide games are more likely to run with a wrapper than a dx<8 game is to run at all.

[kalnaren]

Glide was an awesome technology. Is it even still used?

[Fury]

No, it was proprietary API only used in Voodoo's. It died with them when 3dfx was bought by Nvidia.

[CP5670]

i find the worst games for modern operating systems are the ones built on directx 5-7, and sometimes dx8 (points at red faction). games based on opel gl for exaple never seem to produce problems.

I've seen many cases of it. Try Quake 4 on a recent Nvidia card for example. There was also a problem in Jedi Academy's bloom for a long time, but I think they eventually fixed that.

In almost every case I know of though, it's the GPU companies' fault, and you can usually get a troublesome game to work by changing video card brands. They both have different games with issues, although ATI has been better than Nvidia with this in recent years. One good solution is to have a laptop with a different company's GPU than your desktop, so you can cover all of your games that way.

Glide was an awesome technology. Is it even still used?

You can only use it through wrappers these days, as no modern card supports it natively. The last games to use it exclusively were in 1998 or so, and by 2001 it had pretty much dropped out of games completely.

[Davros]

red faction has a fix for xp
do a search for
PFBeta3FullInternational

[Androgeos Exeunt]

No, it was proprietary API only used in Voodoo's. It died with them when 3dfx was bought by Nvidia.

So wonder Nvidia is the leader in graphics card technology now...

[Davros]

/Davros hugs his voodoo cards + and his powervr pcx2(hail its mightyness)

and yes its a 3d card that doesnt have a monitor connector

[Androgeos Exeunt]

Use /me in future, Davros, unless the use of /Davros was deliberate.

[Davros]

* Davros would just like to remind hardlight readers that he would never refer to himself in the third person....