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.

Originally Posted by tet666
Why even install Vista (aka windows ME II) in the first place while many things dont work properly on it?

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

Originally Posted by tet666
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.

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.

Originally Posted by Jaz
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.

Originally Posted by Alrik Fassbauer
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.

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

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.