admin answers:

>Well, XP has a compatibility wizard, which helped to make older games work. There was no guarantee they would work because Windows 98 is a 16 bit operating system. The main problem are DLL files. Some older games still, used 8 bit to put 16 bit software together. That is what Windows 95 did…because Windows 3.1 was an 8 bit operating system. So you see, it has slowly evolved over the years.

Your best bet is to first install Windows 7 and then install the Windows XP Virtual Machine which is downloadable from Microsoft (I have it on my computer). Then, execute XP Virtual Machine and use the compatibility wizard in XP to try and install and make work even older games…that worked under Windows 2000, ME or ’98. There is no guarantee they will work! I tried making Simcity 4 work this way in Windows XP Virtual Machine and I ran into problems! And Simcity 4 is made for Windows XP.

One thing to do is to make sure that all the DLL files for the game are in the c:windowssystem32 directory. Older games had a tendency to scatter DLL files around alot and not always install them to the system32 sub-directory and so it was sort of a crap shoot back then getting games to work properly. Some DLL files HAVE to be in certain directories within the game folder…others must be in the system32 directory. So, if necessary, copy a copy of ALL the DLL files and put them in the system32 directory. As a last resort, if that doesn’t seem to work, is to put all the DLL files into the main ROOT directory C: This forces DLL’s to be seen “system wide.” In other words, they are no longer “local files” (local just to a specific directory or sub-directory). It also depends on how well the game was coded internally, usually with C++, older games might have even been coded in just plane Jane C program language, which has a lot of call problems in it…that is what C++ did, was it fixed a lot of the C programming language problems which were loose. Then there is one more problem…those really old games were meant to run on old cpu’s with a LOW Mhz rating…I remember under Windows 95 and 98, running a Pentium Classic at 94 Mhz! Well, let’s say you have a 3 Ghz cpu now, which is at least 30 times faster than the old Pentium Classic at 94 Mhz…the game may now speed up 30X…so like, if you have an old pinball wizard game, it could be so fast that it will be like a blurr! LOL. And I am not sure that games prior to DirectX can even work on current gpu’s any longer, considering that backwards compatibility is a real crapshoot. There was a time, you know, when DirectX did not exist and neither did Net Framework. All of the modern, current games rely heavily on Net Framework and DirectX. The old codes used to write drivers for old video cards probably would not work or function in Windows 7 OR even in Windows XP. I remember when getting XP, I had to build a whole new computer just for that operating system because the hardware I had before, would not work with XP – the BIOS for one, could not handle it and then there were driver incompatibilities.

So to sum it up, I think you will have a very difficult time trying to get a bunch of dead games to work. You will just have to try them out one at a time and see if they can even install, and then, even if they install they may not work right, may be jittery or unstable, crash…speed up so fast you couldn’t enjoy the game, etc.

Look at it this way, today we have digital books – 3000 years ago, they wrote on clay tablets. How practical is it to carry a suitcase of clay tablets around with you just so you can read something at lunch? Not very practical. Well, those old old games are like the clay tablets – they had their day and now they are history. Sometimes, you just have to give something up because it no longer works.

Oh yes, one other thing! Only Windows 7 Ultimate and Professional can run Windows XP Virtual Machine – so if you have Windows 7 Home Edition or Windows 7 Home Basic, it won’t work on those two versions.