Not constrained to games...

[Sarah]

This "Windows compatability" thing...
Being of the generation of the good ole' DOS games, I was
very upset when I was eventually forced to upgrade from
Win3.1 to '95 to '98 to 2K, as there were fewer and fewer
of these games I could play, until Win2k which left me
with nothing. So I was delighted that XP incorporated an
emulator for OS's back to Win95. Only still nothing
works. I even noted that the latest game I bought
said "System Requirements: Win95, Win98, NOT compatible
with ME, NT, 2000 or XP" !!! For some of my Win98 games
I've been able to aquire patches, but for the others?
After collecting enough bits of hardware, I've finannly
got myself a second computer, with MS-DOS and Win95,
reserved soley for my games.
Has anyone found a way round this rather annoying problem?
It's not good having to go to such lengths, just to play
Lemmings (the Windows version stinks)and all the rest of
the Lemming collection , Space Quest, etc etc
May I just don't know how to emulate properly, but I think
it's more to do with trying to bring gamers round to the
visual games rather than the thinking games.

 

[Stephen Keen [MS]]

Hi Sarah,
There is a reason to the madness Sarah, older games are made in 8 or 16
bit code. Newer operating systems are running 32 or 64 bit code. Depending
on how the game was designed, it may be nearly impossible to run some older
games on 32 bit code. Microsoft has bent over backward to make older games
work, but sometimes it just isn't going to happen. By your setting up a
second machine is likely the best resolve in your situation where you like
to play many older games. It is possible to set up a dual boot operating
system on the same machine. Problem usually lies in games looking for
specific hardware, IRQ's, ports etc: Newer hardware is often not
"understood" by older software so it has difficulty running some devices
correctly.
Graphics candy is in demand, this is true, but then many of the newer
games truely do make you think. So they are both pretty and intelligent.
Our home has a full drawer of older games, many of which we cannot play.
My hope has always been that they would update these games for the newer
operating system. So I understand your frustration.

There is a new site that will be very helpful to you in your game play
and understanding. Check it out:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/games/gameadvisor/default.asp

Thanks for your post!

 

[Nick Kritselis [MS]]

Sarah,

I think you're mis-understanding the purpose of the Compatibility Modes in
Windows XP. They are not meant to "emulate" MS-DOS, Windows 95, etc.

When Windows XP was in development, we had received many complaints from
users like you who couldn't get games to work on Windows 2000, so we started
looking into why games weren't working on Windows 2000 to see if we could
fix some of these issues.

Some games would make procedure calls to find out which version of Windows
was on your system, and if Windows NT (or NT-based Windows 2000 and Windows
XP) were detected, the game would fail. Other games would fail because they
were trying to write registry keys that are valid for Windows 9x platforms,
but not valid for Windows NT platforms.

We found many different reasons why games were failing, but we also found a
lot of common issues among many of the games. And these common issues are
the reasons we made compatibility modes in Windows XP. These compatibility
modes simply lie to games and try to tell them what they want to hear. If
the game wants Windows 95, Compatibility Mode will say "Sure, I'm Windows
95." and the game may accept that and run.

But we couldn't solve all the problems we found with these simple tricks.
We found many games that wouldn't work no matter what we tried.

But don't give up trying. Search the web. There are many programmers and
gamers out there just like you who want to continue playing these games and
they have probably found or devised ways to make them work that we haven't.
And if you do find ways to get some of these programs to work, please post
your solutions here for others.