Vista and Older Games:- Problems and How to Solve Them
 

As requested, this thread is for people to either inquire about problems they are having with game compatibility under Vista, or for people to offer suggestions and work-arounds to alleviate said problems!!

Thanks, Corwin. Here are some titles to start with, i.e. has anybody tried to run these under Vista?

- System Shock 2
- Fallout 1 & 2
- Ultima 7 (Exult?)
- Wizardry 8
- Arcanum
- Gothic 1?

Why even install Vista (aka windows ME II) in the first place while many things dont work properly on it? I just stick to XP for awhile all my old games work fine there, vista offers basically nothing that makes it worth for me to get trough all the problems that come with it.

Under this topic you can describe some of those "many things", as long as they are in the RPG category.

For awhile. What then? Please keep the Vista vs. XP discussion in another thread, OK?

Yes, this is NOT a trash Vista thread, and any such postings WILL be DELETED!! If you want to trash Vista, please do so in the OFF Topic forum!!

Is this thread only for RPGs or can I ask about my other 40 (won't do them all at once though, the most important ones ,for me, first) games too ?

Feel free to ask about any game, but I can't guarantee that anyone will be able to help you, as this IS an RPG site primarily!! :)

WOW, that's a fast reply. Thanks.
I know, but from the other topics I've been able to gather a lot of people here have played a great deal of games other than RPGs.

I've tried Fallout 1 (played it through) and 2 (just started and frotzed around the village a bit), on Vista Ultimate Edition 64-bit.

Got both to run with only minor glitches (very likely no more than on Win95), by:

(1) Run installer with Admin privileges in Win95 compatibility mode
(2) Run the game executable in Win95 compatibility mode (normal privileges)

Problems encountered:

(1) Occasional graphics glitch where the screen goes momentarily black and stuff reappears when it gets redrawn (e.g. screen scrolls or cursor trails).
Workaround: move the mouse to find a button to bring up the character sheet, pop it up and hide it.
Severity: Not very. It's not *that* frequent and easily worked around. Haven't seen it in FO2 (but haven't played FO2 very far yet).

(2) Color palette is scrambled (rainbow pixels) on startup.
Workaround: quit and start again.
Severity: trivial. It's infrequent and easily worked around.

Other than that, both run completely stably with all features enabled (including sound, which I had trouble with on WinXP).

I'll add another one: KOTOR II. That won't run out of the box (CTD on startup), but it will if you replace the Miles sound system DLL file in its home directory with a different version. If anyone's interested, I can look up the exact details.

Thus far, Vista has been able to run almost everything I've thrown at it. The only two exceptions that spring to mind are a stress-test tool I installed out of curiosity (it just locked up and did nothing) and a hack I tried to get centering force on my force feedback joystick on X3: Reunion. Both were very low-level programs that access hardware pretty much directly, so I wasn't too surprised.

I'm very impressed with the backwards compatibility. It's a far cry from the "can't run lots of stuff" that some people make it.

Do Dos games work on Vista ? Games like all the old(er) RPGs, Castles II, …

I haven't tried any DOS games on it. I rather doubt they won't, however; not without DOSbox or some other emulator anyway.

Here are the games I have installed and checked out on my
Vista home premium laptop:

Gothic 1n2
Arx Fatalis
Fallout 1n2
Fable
Spellforce1
The BfME II
Morrowind

All seem to work relatively fine (some minor glitches here and there).
The only one I tried and Failed to run with success is Spellforce 2
(starforce issues)…

I believe Starforce doesn't support hasta la vista, at least some versions.

That's why Larian removed it altogether with the last patch, as far as I know.

Morrowind, Oblivion and Thief: Deadly Shadows all work under Vista; they show the same behavior they did when running under Win XP (including CTDs ;) ).
The Puzzle Quest demo doesn't like DirectX 10, however.

If Puzzle Quest doesn't support DirectX 10 (which I don't think it does, right?) then it's not using it :) . Vista has both, DirectX 9.0L and DirectX 10 working side by side. So Puzzle Quest either doesn't like Vista's DirectX 9.0L or something else about Vista but DirectX 10 has most likely nothing to do with it at all unless Puzzle Quest is specifically addressing the DirectX 10 API.

Good thing too. Starforce runs in kernel mode, and Vista doesn't let you run just anything in kernel mode. About time too.

Fallout 1 & 2
 

Hi All,
I've just loaded Fallout 1 and 2 onto a new(ish) Vista machine and think I'm about to cry.

Both were installed with the installer in Win95 compatibility mode and with Adin rights. Programs were then started with the .exe in Win95 compatibility mode but with no admin…

Fallout 1 refuses to start at all, telling me it needs 20Mb of HDD - seem to remember it giving that error on a Win95 machine! Fallout 2 started with the 'rainbow pixcels' reported above - but then I loaded the 1.02d UK Patch and now it sits there asking for the CD!!

Help, please, anyone……….

Did you check out the 2 Vista updates that we reported yesterday on our News page? I've only just received my new laptop with Vista and haven't had time to load any games onto it yet, so I can't be of more help.

@potter --

First, try the other compatibility modes. (I noticed I'm actually running Fallout 2 in Win2000 compatibility mode.)

Second, try installing Fallout on another disk or partition instead of C:.

if you have bought the fallout DVD collection you need to install the US patch,
not the UK patch regardless of where you bought it. They are all actually US version. If you install the UK patches it asks for a CD. Been there, done that.

I have heard rampant issues with getting Dungeon Lords to run on Vista - it needs compatibility mode to work at all and even still has some issues for many people.

But that's a positive thing, right :D ?

Apparently Vista could be sold as a "Dungeon Lords prophylactic" ;)

Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened DVD Vista x64 problem and solution
 

This isn't an "older game" per se, but I had and solved a Vista-specific problem with it, so here goes:

Description:

The game failed to start after install: saw a spinning wheel for about a second, then nothing. The problem was not solved by installing the latest PhysX drivers from Ageia, nor by updating to version 1.3.

Cause:

The Tagès copy protection system drivers supplied on the DVD are not Vista x64 compatible and consequently failed to install with the game.

Solution:

Download the version 5.5 drivers from Tagès here [ http://www.tagesprotection.com/5.5/TagesSetup_x64.exe ]. These will install correctly. After that the game came up normally.

Fallout… almost there…..
 

Hi, and thanks for the replies!

I revisited Fallout this morning and started out with a clean install of Fallout 1 to its own folder - i.e. outside the 'Program Folders' set that it defaults to. Realised that I'd been running it in XP compatibility mode….. doh, sorry about that, XP was the last system I had them running under.. so altered that to Win98/Win Me and hey presto - Fallout 1 on a 19 inch widescren monitor… magic! Or it would be if I could just sort out those 'rainbow pixels'…

Unfortunately no luck at all with Fallout 2, which has started to give an error message when installing from the CD - my back-up CD's gone missing so I've just purchased the 3 disk-set from e-bay for a mere £7.50UK (can't be bad!) so thanks for the tip re the US patches!

I missed the two news items… I'll go in search of them now..

I play FO2 in XP with no trouble!!

Fallout - slight return…
 

Is that in XP or Vista using XP compatibility mode?

FO2 was fine in XP for me as well, just looks as though the CD's gone to heaven as I'm getting read errors when trying to load it onto another machine now.

Any ideas on removing the 'rainbow pixels' I'm getting in FO1?
I have it running in 256 colours at the moment but not in 640 x 480 screen resolution…. quitting and restarting has no effect and I'm losing the entire screen every now and again; the only way to bring it back is to run the mouse over it which causes it to redraw…

And have just found an article from Interplay/Black Island that seems to cover just this! The URL is:
http://www.ntcompatible.com/fallout_…ut_t25683.html - fingers crossed!

FO2 runs for me np, but the video gets corrupted if you alt-tab out of the game - believe that happened on XP aswell.

Gothic 3 I wouldn't even bother with, which is a shame as I was looking forward to it on my new rig.

NWN2 is ofc ok but that is like new.

PS:T is going on soon - I have those gamer patches for vista also.

Oh i tried DM of M&M also - it runs but it doesn't like the alt-tab trick either.

I might attempt dual booting Vista and XP when I feel the need to 'upgrade'.
Hopefully that would be best of both worlds game wise.

How big are the differences between the 32bit and the 64bit Vista versions when
talking about backwards compatibility - older games?

In theory the 32bit edition should be able to run most 32bit programs at least when MS releases some more fixes & compatibility packs etc…

The 64bit edition is way more trouble than that- correct?

Incorrect. The 64-bit edition runs 32- and 16-bit programs just fine, both in theory and in practice. To get technical about it, the processor switches to 32-bit mode "on the fly" whenever it gets 32-bit opcodes -- in other words, it looks to the program exactly like a 32-bit processor, in every detail.

The only potential source of 64-bit specific incompatibility is copy protection drivers; I encountered this problem once so far, on a fairly recent game (see an earlier post in this thread).

Hmmm that would certainly be a good thing. No reason not to go with the 64bit edition, then?

I was just reading this the other day:
http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase…sta_ff_x64.asp

It says:

"Sadly, the various benefits of the x64 Vista versions are counterbalanced by a number of limitations, the most important of which are compatibility issues. 16-bit applications are not supported, which is less problematic than it was a few years ago, but still an issue for some applications that use legacy application installers. 32-bit device drivers are not supported, so you can't use any of the existing hardware drivers out there, but must instead use the subset of x64-based drivers that are currently available. This situation will improve over time, but x64 Vista users are going to be orphaning hardware.

New 64-bit applications will need to adhere to the new Windows Vista application standards in order to run correctly on these versions. That means that even some software written specifically for XP x64 might not work correctly."

Anyhow there must be some difference compatibility wise between these two editions, right?

The biggest hassle with 64 bit operating systems (I'm running XP 64 )is the lack of hardware support, mainly drivers. Bought a D-Link wireless network card yesterday, for which there was NO 64 bit support or drivers. Fortunately, my son was able to track down the chip used on the card and found the chip manufacturer actually had 64 bit drivers for the chip and they worked. D-Link was useless; they had nothing and didn't seem to care. Getting other hardware to work has been my biggest problem, but 64 bit is incredibly stable.

Compatibility is pretty much the only thing I care about. I just need an OS on which I can play all my favourite games and would be nice to play some new ones too.
I don't need fancy features or GUI's that eat up half a gig of ram and requires a 256Mb graphics card or a platform that supports 123840809 gigs of ram.

I.. Just.. Want.. My.. Games.. To.. WORK! And I will not use emulators of any kind.

Windows 2000 has been perfect so far, but thanks to the DX10 I guess that's about to change. Right now I'm thinking about Vista Home Basic 32-bit.. seems to be the best choice? Compatibility-wise and that does not even include that horrible abomination called Aero.

In any case I'm still gonna wait a month.. or three… or
five.. before getting anything, though. A few more fixes and a nice big service pack before I start thinking about setting up a new system.

Age of Empires 2 and Expansion, couldn't play without a nocd patch, since it refuses to see cd's. With nocd patch, working fine.

I have the same dilemma. While I've never done this before, I'm probably going to invest in a larger Hard Drive, and run both Windows XP and Vista in a dual boot system (Hopefully that's possible with Vista). Heck, I might even use Windows 98 SE as well; I like older games too. A friend of mine says it's really easy to set up a multi-boot system, and with the advent of Vista and DX10, along with its supposed compatibility problems with older games, this seems like a pretty good time to learn how to configure a system in this way, IMO.

Perhaps someone could post a step by step way to do this!!

STALKER's graphics completely corrupted.

Stalker should work on vista just fine. I know many Vista users who play stalker without problems. I would guess your problems are from somewhere else.
Also, Stalker is really not an old game :D

Well Stalker is FUBAR on mine, as is Thief Deadly Shadows.

Morrowind works fine apart from a weird stall every now and then - not running this on compatibility mode either so may get rid of that. Quite stunning running Morrowind maxed out. I remember the chunk festival it was when I first played it. Still love the look and feel of Vvardenfell.