Games I Wish Worked on Vista
Posted on 12th May 2009 at 10:08 by Joe Martin with 26 comments
I only upgraded from Windows XP to Vista relatively recently – it was really only when I started at bit-tech.net that I actually became concerned with keeping up to date. Until then I'd been happy to stay with whatever OS let me play the games I wanted to play, upgrading only as I needed to to play the latest games.
I’ve regretted the move to Vista ever since, though I was at least wily enough to ensure that my girlfriend’s PC ran XP still, ensuring I had at least one option when struck by the sudden need to play a classic game. You know the need I’m referring to – it usually comes when you’re doing some menial task and you’re somehow reminded of an old game you really liked. Quickly that flash of memory grows, flares into an obsession and you find yourself reinstalling games you haven’t played in years, usually Deus Ex.
That quick burst of obsession is something I experience fairly regularly, mainly because games are such a massive part of my life and I find it hard to break away from them. Some days I can’t cross the street without thinking that I should quicksave first. Oh, how I wish I was joking.
Oh, wow, it's System Shock 2! Joe never talks about that!
Vista is a frequent thorn in my side, responsible for ruining many of my weekends. That flash of memory will hit me and I’ll quickly find myself desperately longing to go back and play an old game like Outcast, but trying to get it to run acceptably will often be an uphill struggle. By the time I’ve finished patching, searching, altering .ini files and setting up DOSbox then the weekend is over and the urge is dead – the flame that burns twice as hot only burns for half as long, as they say. That’s assuming that the game will even run on Vista at all too.
I’m talking mainly about extreme cases here and admittedly there are a lot of games that can easily be configured to work under Vista. It can sometimes be as simple as setting the compatibility mode to Windows XP or 98…but usually it isn’t.
Nor do the compatibility problems affect old games only. The fact that Thief: The Dark Project (1998) doesn’t work under Vista 64-Bit (at least not for me) is to be expected. That game had troubles working under Windows XP, let alone Vista. Other games though, like Thief 3: Deadly Shadows (2004) aren’t nearly as old as all that. It may be a bit unreasonable given the colossal task that faces Microsoft when they design a new operating system, but I’m massively annoyed that a huge part of my games library isn’t easily playable.
Ah, crud
Every time that powerful urge rises and demands that I immerse myself in a good long session of No One Lives Forever or Grim Fandango or Tomb Raider 2 or System Shock 2 then all I get is Bill Gates tutting at me. Grr.
And yes, ostensibly I’m ending this blog post like this because I figured it’s a rant that a lot of people could share in and that a fair number of Vista-based gamers would also be annoyed with. There’s a deeper reason for this blog post though and that’s that I know bit-tech readers are generally a well-read and clever bunch and I’m hoping some of you will be able to make some suggestions to improve Vista compatibility.
Because I really want to play some Thief 2 right now – the cutscenes for those games were awesome.
I’ve regretted the move to Vista ever since, though I was at least wily enough to ensure that my girlfriend’s PC ran XP still, ensuring I had at least one option when struck by the sudden need to play a classic game. You know the need I’m referring to – it usually comes when you’re doing some menial task and you’re somehow reminded of an old game you really liked. Quickly that flash of memory grows, flares into an obsession and you find yourself reinstalling games you haven’t played in years, usually Deus Ex.
That quick burst of obsession is something I experience fairly regularly, mainly because games are such a massive part of my life and I find it hard to break away from them. Some days I can’t cross the street without thinking that I should quicksave first. Oh, how I wish I was joking.
Oh, wow, it's System Shock 2! Joe never talks about that!
Vista is a frequent thorn in my side, responsible for ruining many of my weekends. That flash of memory will hit me and I’ll quickly find myself desperately longing to go back and play an old game like Outcast, but trying to get it to run acceptably will often be an uphill struggle. By the time I’ve finished patching, searching, altering .ini files and setting up DOSbox then the weekend is over and the urge is dead – the flame that burns twice as hot only burns for half as long, as they say. That’s assuming that the game will even run on Vista at all too.
I’m talking mainly about extreme cases here and admittedly there are a lot of games that can easily be configured to work under Vista. It can sometimes be as simple as setting the compatibility mode to Windows XP or 98…but usually it isn’t.
Nor do the compatibility problems affect old games only. The fact that Thief: The Dark Project (1998) doesn’t work under Vista 64-Bit (at least not for me) is to be expected. That game had troubles working under Windows XP, let alone Vista. Other games though, like Thief 3: Deadly Shadows (2004) aren’t nearly as old as all that. It may be a bit unreasonable given the colossal task that faces Microsoft when they design a new operating system, but I’m massively annoyed that a huge part of my games library isn’t easily playable.
Ah, crud
Every time that powerful urge rises and demands that I immerse myself in a good long session of No One Lives Forever or Grim Fandango or Tomb Raider 2 or System Shock 2 then all I get is Bill Gates tutting at me. Grr.
And yes, ostensibly I’m ending this blog post like this because I figured it’s a rant that a lot of people could share in and that a fair number of Vista-based gamers would also be annoyed with. There’s a deeper reason for this blog post though and that’s that I know bit-tech readers are generally a well-read and clever bunch and I’m hoping some of you will be able to make some suggestions to improve Vista compatibility.
Because I really want to play some Thief 2 right now – the cutscenes for those games were awesome.
26 Comments
Discuss in the forums ReplyHell, I got RA working on Windows 7 yesterday. The colours were a bit off, but hell, it was playable.
Or what Krikkit suggested.
That said I'm sure there's some Win98 VMs floating around the internets, not that any of us would do something that naughty...
for me it's xp x32 and vista x64
because i have xp on my system, it allows me to run stuff as if in xp, but should that fail, i can just hop over to my other drive and bingo
my main problem was one of my favourite games doesn't work with pgi-e gfx cards - even the games makers can't figure it out
I make my self die some days.
MS know what games are out there, and that the customer has spent a fortune on buying them. With the swap to XP I lost about £2000 because of games that would simply no longer work. (Before I used the solution I mention below to recover most of them into a playable state.)
The swap to Vista is not as drastic as the swap to XP was, but a lot of games that should work do not.
With XP it was the removal of a true DOS environment that caused a large chunk of the problems, with Vista is it another underlying problem. But the problem is still there never-the-less.
I am not saying those are the only reasons that games do not work under Vista, but fundamental changes to the OS are going to break things.
This is the price we pay for advancement, and while I understand the need for these changes, it really peeves me the way that MS seem to turn a blind eye to the problems they are going to cause.
I have no problems with OS changes, even if they stop me playing a game natively in a new OS, but what we should have had is better support for older games/programs with Vista from MS themselves. "Compatibility mode" is really just a joke and a waste of disk space.
To answer your questions Joe, the only real way around this problem has already been mentioned. Dual-boot XP/Vista, and then for really old 98 games use the free Microsoft VM software loaded on the XP side, and then load a copy of 98 onto it. With this set up I have managed to keep about 95% of all my games playable.
No, you can't make compatibility mode for hacks, because it's impossible. How do you want to make something compatible if it reads/writes something outside of their address space (DEP, PAE, 64-bit), uses some obsolete non-public method (those are not supported, no intented for public use - and sorry, MS doesn't have to check every damn software on this planet), also they can't support forever something they deprecated 10-15 years ago (or would you like to have a 80GB Windows installation for Windows after W7?)...
As i said, in 99% of cases the fault is at the game, better said on game developer. Why mostly only games and software using drivers have compatibility issues ? In case of drivers it's understandable, in case of games not.
However, I do get frustrated by the urge to play old games periodically and Grim Fandango is right up there on the list. I think I feel a bit of tinkering to see if I can get it running on Win 7 is in order...
I had a quick search round the developers website and there was a workround mentioned in the forums (the thread wasn't easily found, and didn't include a link to the needed file - which means more searching), but by that point I had just about given up.
I was running a dual boot system (XP) at the time, so Instead of figuring out exactly what I needed to do to get it running in vista I switched to the other OS.
I haven't tried to get it running in W7 yet (now that I'm not running a dual boot) but I'm not hopeful.
Funny - I've been playing it just fine on Vista 64 lately. Installed it fine, dumped on the latest unofficial patch (Wesp 6.1) and it was fine. Just had to tweak it to work with a widescreen res.
What problem are you having specifically?
I would agree with faugusztin. A good example is Command & Conquer generals. They never figured the default /my documents path would change, so when it did in Vista, it no longer creates the necessary boot.ini files! All solved relatively quickly though by manual copy and paste.
Although I have to say Joe that your writing even in your blog is impeccable, were this written by any other journalist on any other website I would have gone to town I'm sure a Vista advocate (I would not say fan boy, as I'm rational about it :p) but it's the sincerety and honesty of your points that strikes home.
Ultimately however, I think it's one of these 'necessary evils' that follows technology and specifically hardware and software. When the industry, or the powers that be, update to a new platform / idea / methodology whether it be DirectX 10 or BTX or something else altogether, it generally renders a lot of what came before obsolete - because these paradigm shifting events are an opportunity to rewrite everything to the best of our collective ability.
In part it is Microsoft's recent campaign against the developer to do things properly that has caused a lot of problems. Who can forget the problems driver signing caused, despite it being a fantastic idea as most crashes in Windows XP were driver related. Who can forget that when Vista came out, it received universally bad press because of it's shoddy drivers - and it was Microsoft that received this criticism rather than Nvidia, the guilty developers. It's the same story with Microsoft Internet Explorer, because of it's prevalence and because previously it lacked standards, lots of websites were poorly coded and hacked just to get them working. That's fine while you are still using the correct version, but when it comes to using a standards compliant browser (as the user should be free to do) then all hell breaks loose.
Why should consumers be stuck with one product from one manufacturer because the developers only wrote for that platform (be it Windows XP or Windows 3.1 or Mac OS X), well the only reason really is the developers were lazy. Most sales happen in the initial business cycle so if it takes 3 months to get out a hacked version that works now compared to a version that takes 6 months to get out that works forever, then the business manager man will say obviously get the fast buggy version out, we'll just do another one in 6 months and double our sales! (That's basically EA's business strategy :p)
Obviously there are caveats, for example the API used by the developers has to be compatible with the operating system in question. And DirectX as far as I'm aware is just superior to OpenGL so only DirectX compatible operating systems get games (read: Windows).
That's not even a slight bit surprizing, seeing as they mistyped the name of the second disk of Zero Hour in the Delux Edition release, and thus the installer won't recognize it. And it went to the shelves like that. Fairly easy to get around but jesus christ!