PC Games

I have a question about the PC and their games. Do pc games become, not sure how to say this, but "unplayable" after a few years because you get a new computer or software? Like I tried to play Contract Jack, No one lives forever 2, and some tex murphy games on my pc, all of which are at least 6 years old or more(in the case of tex murphy) and i always get an error message saying it wont work for some reason. (I'm not too familiar with computer components). Do computer games become unusable on newer computers after a certain amount of years, rendering old games that you liked into ones that can't be played anymore and aren't sold?

I think PC games are designed with particular things in mind at the time, like graphics cards and processors and whatnot. Sometimes, you may have a graphics card or processor that is so outrageously different than what they had available when the game came out that the game doesn't know how to handle it. I imagine some bits of hardware can be 'backwards compatible', otherwise you may have to look around the 'net for a patch that would make the game work.

What exactly is a patch?

Patch: In computing, a patch is a small piece of software designed to update or fix problems with a computer program. This includes fixing bugs, replacing graphics and improving the usability or performance.

Depends what OS you are running. Most PC games won't work if they are older I believe and for mac games you must have 8.6 or before to play all the old games. (thankfully my only mac left runs 8.6)

According to Playonline the reason FF XI wont play on my PC is beacuse my graphics drivers are too up to date. Grrrr £20 down the pan. (anyone wanna buy FF XI?)

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Originally Posted by blim

According to Playonline the reason FF XI wont play on my PC is beacuse my graphics drivers are too up to date. Grrrr £20 down the pan. (anyone wanna buy FF XI?)

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Surely you can patch the drivers back a couple of iterations? I know that sounds counterintuitive, but it should be possible. Or just wait until they update FFXI to be compatable.

And yes, there can be real problems with older games sometimes. Getting the X-Coms to run is pretty challenging. Getting them to run with stability is more difficult than actually beating the aliens in-game.

On the other hand, some things work fine. My copy of Little Big Adventure 2 works without trouble on my PC, and it's about ten years old now. ... as an aside, I wish Adeline/No Cliche were still active. :(

CIVII and Warcraft 2 still play fine on my newest comp(Windows XP)

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Originally Posted by fantasyjunkie

CIVII and Warcraft 2 still play fine on my newest comp(Windows XP)

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Really? I can't ever get CivII to work on XP :(

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Originally Posted by TrowaBartonIV ^_^

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Originally Posted by fantasyjunkie

CIVII and Warcraft 2 still play fine on my newest comp(Windows XP)

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Really? I can't ever get CivII to work on XP :(

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Mine works fine. When I had XP. I use Linux. But I'm gonna try to run CivII: Test of Time on WINE when I feel like it.

SMAC and its expansion refuse to work on my CPU...

Makes me very, very unhappy. Very unhappy indeed...

XP is very different from previous versions of Windows, which breaks old game compatibility at times. A little bit of Googling can usually point towards a fix.

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Originally Posted by Nominus Experse

SMAC and its expansion refuse to work on my CPU...

Makes me very, very unhappy. Very unhappy indeed...

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Ooooh, that sucks. Mine runs SMAC just fine - in fact, so well I can start to hax things open and make the world much bigger, for example, without incurring slowdown. Don't have SMAX. Never even seen SMAX come to that - I've downloaded it from Underdogs but it doesn't work right. ;_;

I have never missed a game as much as I miss SMAC. I will mourn the loss of my disc for all eternity. :(

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Originally Posted by Nominus Experse

SMAC and its expansion refuse to work on my CPU...

Makes me very, very unhappy. Very unhappy indeed...

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Aren't there patches on the SMAC website?

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Originally Posted by Odaisé Gaelach

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Originally Posted by Nominus Experse

SMAC and its expansion refuse to work on my CPU...

Makes me very, very unhappy. Very unhappy indeed...

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Aren't there patches on the SMAC website?

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There are, and I have downloaded them, but it still refuses to work properly... It will sometimes work, but it's prone to crashes and even stranger things...

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Originally Posted by blim

According to Playonline the reason FF XI wont play on my PC is beacuse my graphics drivers are too up to date. Grrrr £20 down the pan. (anyone wanna buy FF XI?)

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I call BS on this. I've ran FFXI great on my friends new computer, with the newest drives for a NVIDIA GeForce 8800.

Anyways, usually I can find patches for most old games. Oldest game I can play on Windows XP is the original Myst, and that needs a small patch. As well as FF7 and Grim Fandango.

It depends more on the operating system than the actual hardware, I find. You can't expect all games made for win95/98 to run perfectly in windows XP, but a game made in 2002 for Windows XP is very likely to work on a machine with hardware from 2010, if that machine also was running XP. This is assuming there are XP drivers for the new components.

I would say that most PC games can be made to work on much newer hardware than they were made for, but sometimes you need to do a bit of research and tweaking. I play C&C Red Alert (from 1996, i think) on my laptop from 2003. I had to get a small patch, which involved me replacing a file in the program directory, then it worked. This patch, however, was to make it work under Windows XP, it had nothing to do with the hardware in my laptop, just the operating system. A common problem however, is to make MS DOS games work under Windows XP. XP's own DOS "emulator" isn't the best, but you can download a better one, just like you download SNES emulators and such. Computers are awesome like that.

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Originally Posted by I'm my own MILF

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Originally Posted by blim

According to Playonline the reason FF XI wont play on my PC is beacuse my graphics drivers are too up to date. Grrrr £20 down the pan. (anyone wanna buy FF XI?)

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Surely you can patch the drivers back a couple of iterations? I know that sounds counterintuitive, but it should be possible. Or just wait until they update FFXI to be compatable.
:(

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HAHAHAH that's a laugh. SE doesn't care enough about this game to do this. It's still piss poor emulation. It runs max 30 FPS and runs almost entirely on your processor. Yeah, when I was still play FFXI regularly I had to use really old drivers, otherwise various elements within the game would drop me down to about 2-4 FPS to the point that it was unplayable. It's been a piss poor emulation of PS2 for over 3 years, so I doubt they'll be patching jack any time soon. My computer can run Doom3 cranked all the way up without skipping a beat... but you try to play FFXI on it... no beans. Even the drivers I'm currently using don't fix all of the problems. I still drop to about 10 FPS after a teleport (near crag crystals) or during certain spell animations and certain glowing things (cutscenes with the Shadow Lord).


As for other games being too old to play... I'd almost say that nothing is too old to play. You can almost always get something to essentially emulate old software and hardware on newer machines. There are plenty of DOS emulators and old style mouse emulators to make your newer machine recognize and play older games. You just have to know where to look.

Reading this thread makes me realize how much I miss Ultima 6, 7, and 7 the Black Gate on DOS. Those were 3 great RPGs. :(

Populous the Beggining still works on my PC.

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Originally Posted by Yeargdribble

HAHAHAH that's a laugh. SE doesn't care enough about this game to do this. It's still piss poor emulation. It runs max 30 FPS and runs almost entirely on your processor. Yeah, when I was still play FFXI regularly I had to use really old drivers, otherwise various elements within the game would drop me down to about 2-4 FPS to the point that it was unplayable. It's been a piss poor emulation of PS2 for over 3 years, so I doubt they'll be patching jack any time soon. My computer can run Doom3 cranked all the way up without skipping a beat... but you try to play FFXI on it... no beans. Even the drivers I'm currently using don't fix all of the problems. I still drop to about 10 FPS after a teleport (near crag crystals) or during certain spell animations and certain glowing things (cutscenes with the Shadow Lord).

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That's weird, I play on PC and don't have any troubles you mention other than server lag (in beseiged and sometimes dynamis). Yes, it is piss poor emulation I will agree, but if you are having troubles like that I think you might need more RAM. It's hard to compare a MMO to a single player FPS -- especially when in an MMO, RAM and processing speed plays a bigger part in performance than the actual video card.

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Originally Posted by Yeargdribble

As for other games being too old to play... I'd almost say that nothing is too old to play. You can almost always get something to essentially emulate old software and hardware on newer machines. There are plenty of DOS emulators and old style mouse emulators to make your newer machine recognize and play older games. You just have to know where to look.

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DOSBox being a prime example for DOS games. :cool:

That's what I use.

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Originally Posted by Omecle

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Originally Posted by Yeargdribble

HAHAHAH that's a laugh. SE doesn't care enough about this game to do this. It's still piss poor emulation. It runs max 30 FPS and runs almost entirely on your processor. Yeah, when I was still play FFXI regularly I had to use really old drivers, otherwise various elements within the game would drop me down to about 2-4 FPS to the point that it was unplayable. It's been a piss poor emulation of PS2 for over 3 years, so I doubt they'll be patching jack any time soon. My computer can run Doom3 cranked all the way up without skipping a beat... but you try to play FFXI on it... no beans. Even the drivers I'm currently using don't fix all of the problems. I still drop to about 10 FPS after a teleport (near crag crystals) or during certain spell animations and certain glowing things (cutscenes with the Shadow Lord).

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That's weird, I play on PC and don't have any troubles you mention other than server lag (in beseiged and sometimes dynamis). Yes, it is piss poor emulation I will agree, but if you are having troubles like that I think you might need more RAM. It's hard to compare a MMO to a single player FPS -- especially when in an MMO, RAM and processing speed plays a bigger part in performance than the actual video card.

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It was fine back on my ATI card, except for constant artifacting that forced me to either restart POL or run around blind. When I got a new card I went nVidia (they even say that the game is meant to run better on nVidia). I've got a monster card, 2 Gigs of RAM and a 3.2 Gig DC processor. I highly doubt it's a RAM problem as most people don't sport as much RAM as me and still run better than I do.

The issue is in the emulation. FFXI doesn't run well on a variety of hardwares. Most PC games are made and patched to run well with various hardware configurations. FFXI is just a quick, sloppy emulation.



I've tried asking for help everywhere and tries several different drivers. I would have one of these two problems at all times.

#1: Everything would run absolutely superb turned alllll the way up. I could do pretty much anything including no lag during songs or around glowing things and crags. I was sitting pretty at 30 FPS constantly. However, if I did anything with a lot of people, like Dynamis or Limbus or sat in a city for too long, my FPS would slowly start to drop and performance would grind to a stand still. It was like having a hardcore memory leak. It was usually easily fixed by logging out for a few minutes and then logging back in. However, when you are the puller for a timed situation like Limbus, you can't just log out every 10 minutes because your performance sucks.

#2: I could do all long things like Dynamis and Limbus just fine. I didn't get gradual slow downs. Glowing things like crag crystals additionally didn't slow me down. The problem.... BRD songs would drop me to about 2 FPS for 3-4 seconds every time they went off. As a career BRD you just can't have that.


So in the end I ended up going with really old drivers that allowed me minimal song lag but horrible glowy things lag. I was also able to do things like Dynamis and Limbus as long as I didn't keep my specs turned all the way up.


For a non-single-player comparison, I can play WoW turned all the way up and even be in very crowded places and still be sitting on top of 60 FPS. Granted, WoW is arguably more archaic graphically, but as far as processing a lot of information about your surrounding (people moving and stuff), it's gonna be similar to FFXI and other MMOs.

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Originally Posted by Nominus Experse

There are, and I have downloaded them, but it still refuses to work properly... It will sometimes work, but it's prone to crashes and even stranger things...

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(Sorry to hijack the thread, but...)

What about this guide?
http://www.firaxis.com/games/game_detail.php?gameid=7

I don't get any problems at all Yearg, maybe it's because I have a different version? I have the Australian version of PAL (EU). But yes, it's extremely poor emulation, I wish SE would get off their butts and make it better for PC gamers.

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Originally Posted by Odaisé Gaelach

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Originally Posted by Nominus Experse

There are, and I have downloaded them, but it still refuses to work properly... It will sometimes work, but it's prone to crashes and even stranger things...

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(Sorry to hijack the thread, but...)

What about this guide?
http://www.firaxis.com/games/game_detail.php?gameid=7

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Do you want to make babies? Do you want my left hand? What do you want? Anything at all?

smurf, you made my day and probably the next six years of my life.
:love:


I didn't change the "0" to "1" in the Alpha Centauri.ini file. But it is now healed and you have been made a savior.

Well, I've never been able to get Star Wars: Dark Forces (1995) to play on Windows XP, though I've heard many people could. I've tried following various guides to doing it, and it never worked; so I just said, "To hell with it" and bought the PSX version.

Well Xalibar, there are 2 basic things you can do to try to maker your game run. If you're using Windows XP ( this might work on other versions of Windows as well) find the program of the game you're trying to run in the Start menu, then right click it, go into the compatibility tab, and then try checking "Run this program in..." (right at the top of the window) and then pick the older system the game was designed for (maybe Windows 98), then click apply and OK, and run the game program.

This has worked for me many times for older games on the XP.

You can also search for a patch on the Net for a particular game if the above doesn't work. There are often patches by fans or the companies who made the games to make the game work better on certain systems, those these can be rather hard to find sometimes and may take a lot of searching.

Even if your games are six years old they should run if one of those two things works. I've found ways to run games much older, so you should find a way... hope this helps.

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Originally Posted by Omecle

I don't get any problems at all Yearg, maybe it's because I have a different version? I have the Australian version of PAL (EU). But yes, it's extremely poor emulation, I wish SE would get off their butts and make it better for PC gamers.

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There's no such thing as PAL and NTSC when it comes to PC games :p.