[Akalabeth Angel]

What's with this continually pile of crap where you can't play old games on new OSes? I bought the Thief Collection off Ebay and the ****ing game won't even install. Graaaah  All the online suggestions/workarounds do **** all to help.

It's like they INTENTIONALLY make it different so that old software is incompatible.

[Mars]

Capitalism FTW 

[Akalabeth Angel]

Oh, I did some further digging. And got the game to install! Yay!

Though when I started it up, the movie was sputtery and the game froze during training. One problem down, one more to go! damnit. Damn I'm tired of doing this every time I want to play some old classic.

[Spicious]

The bigger problem is that compatibility is maintained. Improved stability would be simpler if backwards compatibility were dropped or at least reduced.

[Fury]

Spicious, indeed. Any software (and hardware) would work better if they could drop legacy support. Just look at latest x86 processors, they still support most if not all instructions that date back to Intel 386. Talk about legacy bloat.

I think I had Windows 98 (or was is 95?) and Voodoo 2 when Thief came out, my cousin was showing it to me and he had NVIDIA TNT. My god, that was like a lifetime ago. Do you seriously expect games that were released ten years ago to work flawlessly?

If you ask me, legacy support should be dropped where possible and virtualization used for legacy applications instead. As a matter of fact, if you're running business editions of Windows (like XP Pro), you can use VirtualPC for free. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/downloads/virtualpc/default.mspx

[Spicious]

The x86 is just a mess these days (less so than the P4, but still). Thousands of cycles to trap into kernel mode is terrible.

[Fury]

They aren't perfect by any means (then again, what is?), but when it comes to efficiency, RISC blows x86 out of the water. But thanks to over 95% of software coded to x86, the switch seems to be impossible.

[CP5670]

This particular engine (which is also used in System Shock 2) is known to have several issues on modern systems, but there are ways to fix all of them. At least for SS2, you have to use a no CD patch, a core affinity patch, compatibility mode and a few changes in one of the config files to get everything working properly. The first two Thief games should be similar. See if you can find anything on the TTLG forums about it.

Do you seriously expect games that were released ten years ago to work flawlessly?

Absolutely. Most such games will in fact work without any issues.

However, in the cases where problems comes up, it's usually not Microsoft that is to blame but the GPU companies. Legacy compatibility can vary quite a bit between Nvidia and ATI cards as well as specific driver versions.

If you ask me, legacy support should be dropped where possible and virtualization used for legacy applications instead.

That would be great if there were actually decent virtualization or emulation programs specifically for Windows games. Virtual PC doesn't support 3D acceleration at all and has dodgy compatibility and performance even in non-3D games.

[castor]

If you ask me, legacy support should be dropped where possible and virtualization used for legacy applications instead.

Would that even solve the problem, or just turn it into another one?
Granted, it is a nice concept, and virtualization SW can be improved as time passes.. but couldn't it also result in even less stability with older apps than there is now? I mean, legacy HW and APIs at least exist and are known to work, but every virtualization is a new creation.

Or am I missing a point here? I admit I've no experience with these whatsoever.

[Akalabeth Angel]

I think I had Windows 98 (or was is 95?) and Voodoo 2 when Thief came out, my cousin was showing it to me and he had NVIDIA TNT. My god, that was like a lifetime ago. Do you seriously expect games that were released ten years ago to work flawlessly?

      Sure. My computer now is at least as good (and many times better) as my computer was then, therefore it should work.
      If not the OS as a whole then I should be able to go easily into some sort of state that allows me to run older programs. Like for example, the command prompt. Why not just make that full fledged DOS or some equivalent? Then all a person has to do is drop to the command prompt to play DOS games, maybe throw on some moslo. I mean, what is the point of the command prompt in windows XP or whatnot? The only time I ever use the thing is when I want to know a files' extension because stupid XP won't show to me in Explorer. Speaking of which, how DOES a person change the extension of a file in explorer. Or does a person have to go into properties or some ****. (Like for example, if I'm in explorer, and I want to backup Freespace2  exe then I do something like copy and rename it to freespace2.bak it's not going to be freespace2.bak it's going to really be freespace2.bak.exe)

[Spicious]

Have you tried switching off extension hiding?

[Akalabeth Angel]

Have you tried switching off extension hiding?

Hmmn, where would I find that toggle? In the control panel somewhere?

[Spicious]

It's in folder options, in the view tab: "Hide extensions for known file types".

[Akalabeth Angel]

It's in folder options, in the view tab: "Hide extensions for known file types".

Ah, sweet thanks. One less frustration.

[Titan]

Idea: Have those... uhm, what do you call them, uh.... Emulators! Yeah, emulators. I remember when i was like 7, i would sit on MY laptop for hours and play MAME

[Androgeos Exeunt]

Crash Windows
**** Linux
Buy A Mac

I was quite cheesed with Microsoft when I found out that ActiveSync was not Vista-compatible. Not that I use either one anyway.

What I don't get is why DOS games no longer work on XP. The OS still runs on what appears to be MS-DOS, so why doesn't it work?

[CP5670]

They will generally work. However, you will get no sound and they will often be too fast to be playable.

For DOS games though, we have the excellent Dosbox emulator. At this point in its development, it runs pretty much any game perfectly. There is nothing comparable for Windows games though.

[IceFire]

Crash Windows
**** Linux
Buy A Mac

I was quite cheesed with Microsoft when I found out that ActiveSync was not Vista-compatible. Not that I use either one anyway.

What I don't get is why DOS games no longer work on XP. The OS still runs on what appears to be MS-DOS, so why doesn't it work?

There is a MS-DOS console but most of the other DOS related stuff is not present in the Windows NT products... of which both XP and Vista are related.  The console is present more for command line related server stuff than anything else...and its just there on XP Home....because its there.

As CP5670 points out....any DOS games you really should run using DosBox.  Its a great DOS emulator and it takes care of any DOS game related issues.  I still play Aces of the Pacific and Ace Over Europe on occasion (on Vista no less ) and DOS box is brilliant.

[Fury]

What I don't get is why DOS games no longer work on XP. The OS still runs on what appears to be MS-DOS, so why doesn't it work?

I'm sorry but this pretty much explains this whole topic.

There is no DOS under any NT-based OS such as XP. What you think is DOS, is nothing more than a command prompt. Which just happens to look like DOS and knows a lot of the old DOS commands. DOS has been dead since 2000, which just happens to coincide with release of Windows 2000 and the last 9x based OS; Windows ME.

Still, you can create a DOS boot disk in XP. But why bother, DOSBox does it better.

[Vidmaster]

can't you get Thief 1 and 2 to work somehow? I thought I played them on XP.
Anyway, Thief 3 works for sure, I got a copy here.