Windows 7 Games Compatibility Testing

Windows 7 Steam Compatibility

Steam is such a popular gaming platform within the PC gaming community, that we felt it needed representing in our Windows 7 compatibility testing – especially as we couldn't find all the disks for the games we wanted to try out.

It's an oft-forgotten but notable fact that Valve's Steam platform doesn't assure compatibility with your hardware set-up or OS when you buy a game, unlike some competing retro-games platforms like Good Old Games, who use virtual machines to guarantee the game will run on your PC. That said, Good Old Games don't sell new games, like Batman: Arkham Asylum, so it's swings and roundabouts.

Speaking of hardware, it's worth clarifying just what hardware we had in our testing machine in light of the OpenGL errors discussed on the last page. Check the system specs below and rest assured we used all the latest drivers.

CPU: Athlon II X2 250
Motherboard: MSI 770-C45 AM3
GPU: Gainward GeForce GTX 260-216 896MB
RAM: 2GB Corsair XMS3 Dominator DDR3

In other words, the PC we built was more than capable of handling all the games we threw at it, though that can create problems of it's own when you're dealing with older games designed for slower hardware. Fortunately, none of the games we decided to test had any of those particular issues.


Hmm - when you lay the results like that then it may turn out to be easier to try and list just the games that don't work on Steam, since there's only one of them. Truth be told, we actually tried pretty hard to find an old game that wouldn't work on Windows 7, even going back to Commander Keen and looking at obscure titles like the excellent Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich.

In the end though, even though Valve doesn't promise compatibility with any game running on Steam, it seems that that compatibility is there anyway, for the most part. The only game we could find which wouldn't work was Jedi Knight 2 - which we only tested on Tim's insistence that it was the best game ever (Jedi Knight 1 was better - Ed). The error thrown up by Jedi Knight 2 was similar to the error we got for Quake Wars too, with a graphics error appearing at game launch saying "Could not open OpenGL subsystem" and then crashing the game. It's worth noting that the Jedi Knight 2 runs on id's Quake 3 engine, so it seems like id Software's preference of OpenGL may be the cause of the troubles.

Either way, we did a spot of investigation to try and find out if there was a solution for this problem and found out that it's one which has been known about for a while in the Jedi Knight fan community, and that the problem isn't the OS, but the hardware and drivers. Awkwardly though, we weren't able to find a consistently recommended or reliable suggestion about how to fix the problem beyond waiting for new drivers or rolling back to an older graphics card.