I want to play Warcraft 2. I have Windows XP Professional and a Voodoo3 video card. Warcraft 1 works perfectly. War2 however loads perfectly except that the video is completely garbled. The opening movie plays OK, then the display is pure trash. I know the game is running, because I can start it by clicking randomly. The soundcard even works. I would've thought the soundcard would've given me problems if anything.

3dfx went out of business recently. But they do have a 3rd-party Voodoo3 driver on their site written by some hackers, which I tried. War2 didn't work. So I tried the crappier driver that Windows XP published themselves. Still doesn't work. I think my card is too new for War2 to recognize, since it's such an old game, and for DOS. War2 comes with a video setup program called UVCONFIG.EXE. The option to pick a "RAM DAC ID" lists old cards like Trident and such. The amount of memory they give you to choose from starts at 256k and goes up to 8MB, that ought to tell you how old the game is. There are three other options, "Ignore old VBE BIOS", "Disable VBE 2.0 extensions", and "Disable linear framebuffer". No idea what any of those mean, or if using them in some combination might help me. UVCONFIG crashes no matter what options I choose. Well I'm not sure if it crashes, but when it tries to test itself, my monitor gives me a "Scan out of range" message or something and the program dies.

I've tried running Windows XP in those stupid compatibility modes, they didn't help. I think if I remember correctly that War2 worked when I had Windows 95/98/ME before I installed XP. Not sure about that though.

I thought maybe I could use a VESA or SuperVGA emulator to make War2 think I was using a different video card, but I have no idea if such things exist, let alone how to use them. I don't even know too well what VESA means. I don't know much about video cards. I even considered trying to play War2 in Wine on Linux, but I didn't even come close to getting that to work at all.

I don't really expect too much help, but who knows. Couldn't hurt to ask.