Thanks Gordon. Gone are the days of needing a boot disk, understanding conventional memory, and figuring out how to free up memory just to play games on your PC. Running games isn’t always easy these days, even if your hardware is below the minimum requirements or you want to play older games that only run in virtual machines or emulators. to play online games that aren’t available in your region, or revert to previous games that were compatible with your setup. Maybe he rebuilt his 1998 PC just to play Half-Life. (opens in new tab)or built a tiny PC to play classic console games (opens in new tab).
What’s the maximum length you’ve gone just to run the game?
Here is our answer. forum.
Christopher Livingston, Feature Producer: Is it important to buy a brand new PC? When I started playing The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion in 2006, it was already on a PC that was several years old. Home where he has it on his Xbox 360 and hooked it up to the TV. That’s when I realized that his PC was a potato, his monitor was a postage stamp, and his in-game viewing distance was about 15 feet from his character’s face.
I bought a new PC and monitor and it felt like I was playing a completely different game. Textures had… textures! I could see the Spire of the Imperial City from anywhere on the map! Sometimes the grass on the other side of the fence looks greener.
Andy Chalk, NA News Lead: Like Chris, I’ve bought entire PCs (yes, multiple) for individual games. It’s been quite a while since I last bought a fully pre-built system, but for his Doom he replaced the 386 SX/25 setup he bought for BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk’s Revenge, he’s a 486 DX4/ I bought 100. Hell, I just bought my first PC to play games on.
The biggest non-financial length I’ve ever done for a game was setting up a network to play multiplayer Doom. I can’t tell you what the absolute pain in that butt was. I bought a network card and cable, but never used it for anything else.Forget it, monitors were heavier back then) and blew half a night trying to figure out the config files and scripts why this sonofavich doesn’t work, all four of us could sit around the kitchen table, ripped apart and blast each other to pieces until dawn. (It was worth it.)
Jody Macgregor, Weekend/AU Editor: Discworld Noir came out in 1999 and doesn’t work well with modern operating systems. I had to emulate Windows 95 PCem (opens in new tab) to make it work.In the end it really wasn’t worth it and I wish I knew Pratchett was less involvement in each game (opens in new tab) Because the Discworld series followed before I bothered to go.
But I can’t believe I’m admitting this, but the game that jumped the most hoops to actually do is Dead or Alive Xtreme Venus Vacation. When I learned that the Steam version of this beach volleyball jiggle physics showcase wasn’t available outside of Asia, I circumvented restrictions out of the same self-righteous indignation I felt when yet another game was denied classification in Australia. I thought finding a way was kind of the thing. of moral obligation.
I had never played a Dead or Alive game, but I downloaded a VPN and convinced Steam that I was in Singapore. That wasn’t enough and I had to go into the Windows regional settings and change it to Singapore, then dig into the system locale settings and change it to English (Singapore), so Steam finally released the English version of this horndog free gacha nonsense .
I ended up getting bored before completing all the tutorials.There are so many badly translated menus and intentionally confusing descriptions of currencies and tokens to click through and easier ways to see boobs. the man tell me what to do
Gimbali: Oh my god You could mention getting an Ageia PhysX card to run something, but originally it was done to run his MechWarrior 2 on a 486 33 mhz computer with an 8 meg ram and a 1 meg SVGA card you have to do that. If you’re an old geek, you know how huge it was when my dad got his PC in 1992.
It wasn’t powerful enough to run MechWarrior 2 anyway, and my dad had no way of getting a new mobo and chip to run it. So after a while my dad bought me a computer magazine, and it had Evergreen Upgrades on his chip. You can run an old 486 at Pentium speeds, so you can play Quake and MechWarrior.
Well I was sold and luckily my local future shop had some in stock, I wanted some good MechWarrior and this was the fastest chip install.
Sadly it didn’t work without the good old boot disk. So I grabbed the awesome boot disk made by the X-Wing game, did the *best boot disk auto setup ever*, and entered the queue for the CD-ROM to work. I booted it up and my god it was heaven…
Sarafan: Command & Conquer: It took hours to get Tiberian Sun running properly on modern hardware. In theory it’s as easy as installing a community patch. This will fix the issue on Windows 10. In practice, community patches cause very long load times on many hardware configurations. They are so silly that the game is almost unplayable.
So I decided to abandon the community patch and try dgVoodoo2. It worked, but… the wrapper created another problem: terrible lag that appeared randomly during gameplay. And when I mean terrible, I mean terrible. Basically everything slows down, even the cursor has severe input lag. So the result was again unplayable.
Over the next few hours I worked through all the settings available on dgVoodoo2 and tried other versions of the game. All this is in vain. But I was determined to run the game on my own hardware, so I didn’t give up. I’ve used compatibility mode in combination with various dgVoodoo2 settings. It didn’t help. I tried mixing files from dgVoodoo2 and unofficial patches. The results were even promising. Long load times and no lag, but then… it crashes! The game started crashing every few minutes.
One last idea came to my mind when I was desperate to try out an older version of dgVoodoo2. The game performed questionably well in windowed mode. yes! Full screen optimization! that was the key. After disabling them (in properties after right clicking the shortcut to the game) and using the standard dgVoodoo2, the game finally started running on modern hardware without any meaningful issues!
This discovery was dominated by long attempts, so if you want to play the game and the unofficial patch doesn’t work, try the above. There is nothing.
Brian Boll: MUO’s Joel Lee issued a single challenge for WhatNerd to be able to run Command and Conquer on Win10. The standard one you try was simple enough.It took about 45 minutes, including completing the first GDI mission.
Pifanger: I can’t remember a specific example, but I know I spent hours fiddling with (community) patches, editing ini files, and changing graphics options. Getting multiplayer to work can sometimes be a real challenge, requiring you to learn about port forwarding and experiment with 3rd party he programs like Hamachi and Tunngle to trick the game into thinking you’re on the same network. was.
When I was about 13 and befriended the kid who moved in next door, we got a very long ethernet cable to plug our computer directly into and ran the cable out onto the balcony. I think most of the games worked fine over the internet until our neighbors later refurbished their balcony and cut the cables.
Zed crumpets: I don’t think I’ve really gone to any particular length. One thing that immediately comes to mind is years later when I bought the original Fallout 3 and it took me about 30 minutes to sort it out. Had I spent another $10 and bought the Game of the Year version, I wouldn’t have had to do anything. To add insult to injury, I purchased the DLC with the improved ending that was included in the GOTY version.
Reisengang: It’s not for one game, but my brother’s old gaming laptop was really limping. It had an Nvidia GT 555M and an Intel Sand Bridge i5 (i5-2430M I think, but I can’t remember exactly) and had 2 cores and 4 threads. This thing is firmly in the category of “battle bus”. I took the whole thing apart to replace the CPU + GPU thermal paste (this was a huge pain in the ass, it’s a monster). The CPU was throttling all the time and I was tanking the clocks to keep the temps down so it legitimately helped to a great extent. Now that it’s processed, the frame rate is more stable. Still, potatoes are potatoes after all. What you can do with these old systems is limited.
Slasken: I bought a new computer in 2015 to play The Witcher 3. GPUs still work today. I use it on my daughter’s PC. It’s a GTX970. Give parts to your kids or wife when you upgrade. It reduces the economics of the PC part. I rarely sell computer parts that I don’t use.
Corif: I used 32-bit windows much longer than if I wasn’t using them for games that 64-bit windows weren’t good at. It has since been converted to play nicely on 64bit. Ah, the 32-bit limit was fun. It was up to 3.5 GB of RAM no matter how much I put in. I hope you don’t have too much vram on your GPU (I wonder how you install an 8 GB GPU on a 32bit machine).
Alm: In 2001, I used some of my student loans to buy a gaming PC for the hall. Not just Counter Strike 1.6, but that’s what I mostly used.
Main: I replay a lot of old games, so getting them to run efficiently on modern PCs at higher resolutions is always a concern. But since Windows 10 became the standard OS, I haven’t had any major problems installing or running older games. In addition, there are many “enhanced” versions and remasters that make installing and playing older games more comfortable.
The first game I couldn’t even run was Sacred 2 Gold (Steam version). Sacred 2 is his great ARPG released in 2008 and an often underrated game. The Gold version includes his one expansion pack (not just a DLC, but an expansion pack) Ice and Blood. But it doesn’t run. Opening the task manager shows it’s running, but I certainly can’t play it. So I had to manually shut it down.
A quick Google search revealed that I needed to launch the Legacy PhysX driver available on Nvidia’s website. I installed it (and works with his current PhysX driver) and the game launched perfectly. To continue running without CTD, you need to install the current community patch (available from a fan site called Dark Matters) (which fixes hundreds of bugs and adds quality of life improvements).
A very easy fix, not too extreme. The whole process probably took me 30-40 minutes. Want to run old games? There could be a community patch, an unofficial patch, or a mod that allows the game to run without crashing.
