Running old windows games on xp...

[deathstryke]

I recently bummed Master of Orion 2 and Mechwarrior 3 off of a friend of mine but they refuse to run more than the intro movies before they terminate. I have tried the various compatabilty settings but to no avail. I run xp pro on the machine I am trying to run these on. Any ideas?

[Shadow]

DOS Box, various legacy emulation programs, various things like this are of good search ideas.

Personally, I have a couple of legacy machines that I run them on. Look for a friend who doesn't want their old PC or something. I've accumulated like 3-4 of those recently. I don't even know what's in a couple of them.

I'm not sure what OS those games run the best on, but XP isn't one of them. There are emus and such, like DOS Box, but my expierence always showed that it wasn't as faithful as the hardware and operating systems they were simply intended for.

[deathstryke]

Dos box only works for real mode dos games. Both of those are windows native but just refuse to work. I don't know anyone with an old box I could use. I'm half tempted to repartition and setup several other oses on my comp.

[Shadow]

Yeah, some of the tomb raiders are that way. If they have install type programs which try to copy stuff around to work in windows like they would on Win95/98 then try to configure stuff with the game options themselves, then if you don't get anywhere, go into the registry and remove the keys the software program put in after you uninstall the game. Then, reinstall and try again.

I could get most of the old Tomb Raiders to work on Windows XP Pro by doing this without using Eidos' XP patches. Using that little jumper cable that you run from your CD-ROM into your motherboard that gives you analog soundcard audio(you won't get music for certain parts in older games without using this cable), or whatever that is, and then doing a completely clean install, with some compatability settings, I could get the original Tomb Raider to work perfectly on XP Pro. The original was written for DOS. I even get the music at the title screen, the ambience in the game, and all intermission videos work fine.

That's another thing to try, if the game/company is big enough, they might provide patches for XP.

Personally I'd partition out, or look for a $100 computer in local wanted ads. Maybe you can find a local wanted ad message board on the internet dedicated to your rough area. One of the ISPs in our area provides a service like this and the message board is heavily used.

[deathstryke]

There is a little shop in a nearby town that sells old comps, but they are a little too old for some of the things I want to run. The best he has are low end P2s and Mechwarrior 3 doesn't run too great without a P3. I'll have to try your registry trick tonight. As to the cable, I'll probably be running these as images in Alcohol 120% so that won't help any.