Getting old games to work under WinXP

Four years ago, I bought a new computer that came pre-installed with Windows XP. Even though there's a lot of hype around its "Compatibility mode", I found that very few of my old DOS or Win95 games still worked. Fortunately, I have been able to get most of them working fine, with a few unfortunate exceptions (King's Quest 3, Gabriel Knight 1 with sound). Here are a few tips I found useful. See also: the compatibility chart.

Since then, computers have been getting faster and solutions for vintage gaming better. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to take advantage of that until last week, when I bought a shiny new Intel Mac and promptly installed Windows XP on it. Now it seems that the best way to get old games to work is to use DOSBox. It really does a fine job if your computer can handle it. VDMSound no longer seems to be maintained, although I use an old version on my old computers and it does the job just fine.

So the moral of the story is: if your computer is powerful and you want to play a DOS game, go to DOSBox first. For Lucasarts games (and a few others, including the great Beneath a Steel Sky), use ScummVM. Otherwise, read on, and also check out the compatibility chart and the triple booting mini-HOWTO.

• Don't waste your time with the Compatibility Mode settings. They never worked for me. Even asking something simple like "Run this program in 256 colors with 640x480 resolution" did nothing. In my opinion, you are better off doing things manually, though YMMV.
  
  
• If the game doesn't recognize your sound card: a lot of old games, particularly from Sierra, completely crashed because they couldn't recognize my sound card. There is one magical answer: download VDMSound. From their website: "[VDMSound] is a self-contained, 100% software emulation program that is completely independent of your audio hardware type and settings. VDMSound works with any soundcard". This program solved most, if not all, of my sound-related problems. Be aware, though, that a number of Sierra games will actually have sound this way, but will still have that box before the Sierra logo that says "Unable to initialize your audio hardware". Try dismissing that box and starting the game anyway, you might be surprised. For LucasArts games, you can try ScummVM.
  
  
• If the sound/music are stuttery or choppy: I'm not sure that's related to the game being old, but since I had this problem on two Win95 LucasArts games (Grim Fandango and Full Throttle), I thought I'd include a fix here. The Windows Games troubleshooting tells you to set the music acceleration on your card to "Basic". That doesn't work. I had to set the music acceleration to as high as was supported by my card (in dxdiag), and then the games worked fine. I wish I had figured that out before finishing Full Throttle, though :( Update: Full Throttle is now almost perfectly functional in ScummVM, so try that if you have problems with it.
  
  
• If the game has timer-related problems: this applied mainly to Sierra games, in my experience. In a lot of games there are timed puzzles, or things you have to do for a certain time before the game lets you go on (the weight room in Leisure Suit Larry 3, anyone?). For some obscure reason, the timing algorithms depend on the speed of the CPU. So on modern computers, either you have no time to complete the task and so die, or you have to stay in a situation for a really long time (I had to lift weights for a good 20 minutes in LSL3, I swear my fingers got a tremendous workout from hitting the up and down arrows repeatedly). The fix: slow down your processor to a speed acceptable to the games, like 30 MHz. Unfortunately, most slow-down programs I've seen were buggy or annoying (ie, work for only 20 minutes). The only program that's worked for me in XP is Abandon Loader. It has a lot of stuff beside a slow down utility, but that stuff didn't work for me. Anyway, their slow down utility works fine. To avoid crashing your computer, though, you might want to load Abandon Loader, start the game, Alt-Tab back to Windows and slow down the computer, then Alt-Tab back to the game.

  You can also try using DOSBox, an x86 emulator for a variety of operating systems. I haven't tried its slowdown utility, but I was pleasantly surprised to be able to use it to get past a bug in Conquest of the Longbow.
  
  

• If the game needs to run in 640x480 256 colors VGA mode and Windows can't do that for you: My solution might be clunky, but it works fine for me. I have edited boot.ini to have a boot-up option of starting Windows with the base VGA video drivers. Here's my original boot.ini file:

  
  [boot loader]
  timeout=30
  default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
  [operating systems]
  multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home 
  Edition" /fastdetect
  

  
  I added the line:

  
  multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home 
  Edition, VGA" /fastdetect /BASEVIDEO
  

  That is, it is the exact same line I had before, but with the label changed (could be anything) and the tag /BASEVIDEO added. You need to adjust this depending on what your boot.ini looks like.
  
  Note that boot.ini is by default a hidden, read-only system file. You will need to change its attributes before you can mess with it. It might be wise to make a backup.
  
  
• Miscellaneous graphics, memory... problems: The VDMS Launchpad, available at the same page as VDMSound, has some compatibility settings that you can try. For example, it can try to emulate basic VESA support.
  
  
• Old Lucasarts games that don't quite work right: Try downloading ScummVM and running the game with it. I tried this on Monkey Island 2, which previously worked but didn't have sound, and it worked fine. On the website is a list of games that are currently supported. They are currently pretty close to completely supporting every game on their list.

I'm not sure any of the solutions presented here are optimal or elegant, but they work for me and I can play most of my games pretty happily. I hope you will find my suggestions helpful. Please contact me at hayati [at] gmail [dot] com if you have any questions, comments, or additions.

Katia Hayati
Last updated May 29, 2006
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