Author Topic: Help running old games (Read 7819 times)

Condor33 · « **on:** November 05, 2009, 06:05:34 PM »

There's a pretty old game from the Win98 era called Tanktics that I used to play, and when I upgraded to XP it wouldn't run. Well, it sorta ran but would crash almost immediately. Now that I have Vista 64 bit I'm desperately trying to get the game again for nostalgia purposes, among other things. The demo (don't want to spend money on a game I might not be able to run) installs alright, but then it gives me a fatal error: Incorrect version of DirectX. The stupid game is supposed to run on DirectX 7! I tried to download VirtualPC in order to set up an actual Win98 computer, but that kinda failed seeing as how I don't have a 98 installation disk anymore. Compatibility does jack. What should I do?

JoeBlo · « **Reply #1 on:** November 05, 2009, 08:46:04 PM »

I think vista was always messy with backwards compatibility

one thing you can do is research around and see if others have the same problem, I got a windows 95 game to play on my XP because someone created a little program that would start it up correctly so there was no errors or issues

another thing is try "run this program in compatibility mode for", 98

Doomkiller · « **Reply #2 on:** November 06, 2009, 12:15:07 AM »

Quote from: JoeBlo;77322

I think vista was always messy with backwards compatibility

Correct, Took me ages before i got doom 2 to work.....

Anyway, what directx does it need? Get that direct x, put it in the same folder as the game, put the combility to windows 98, then try to run it in 256 colours and 640x480 and as administrater. Thats how i got doom to work

Condor33 · « **Reply #3 on:** November 06, 2009, 06:43:41 AM »

I would do that, but I don't want to overwrite the latest version of DirectX I have installed. Is there any way I could get the old version to just apply to one game?

Doomkiller · « **Reply #4 on:** November 06, 2009, 06:45:01 AM »

Hmmmm, get a usb, and on a different computer, install the direct x. Then get the folder, shove it on the usb, then put it into the game folder

See if that works

Reier · « **Reply #5 on:** November 06, 2009, 08:34:41 AM »

I got POD, I '97 game to work on my XP. But IDK much about that kind of stuff.

cephalopod · « **Reply #6 on:** November 06, 2009, 12:15:18 PM »

Quote from: Doomkiller;77371

Hmmmm, get a usb, and on a different computer, install the direct x. Then get the folder, shove it on the usb, then put it into the game folder

See if that works

Practically how I got RW:ED to work on my laptop. Installed it on the home computer then sent all the files to my laptop. works fine.

Naryar · « **Reply #7 on:** November 06, 2009, 03:54:22 PM »

Tanktics... I played that a loooooong while ago.

And i loved it.

Condor33 · « **Reply #8 on:** November 06, 2009, 04:30:15 PM »

Awesome, wasn't it?

Ok let me get this straight:

Download demo
Install game with old DirectX
Move old DirectX to Tanktics game folder
Reinstall latest DirectX onto system
Set compatibility to Win98
Pray
And it should work?

I don't want to mess up my comp, so tell me if I'm doing this right.

Naryar · « **Reply #9 on:** November 07, 2009, 07:08:22 AM »

Googled it a little, but it doesn't seems to work under XP even with DirectX 6.

Serge · « **Reply #10 on:** November 07, 2009, 05:23:34 PM »

Quote from: Condor33;77447

Awesome, wasn't it?

Ok let me get this straight:
Download demo
Install game with old DirectX
Move old DirectX to Tanktics game folder
Reinstall latest DirectX onto system
Set compatibility to Win98
Pray
And it should work?

I don't want to mess up my comp, so tell me if I'm doing this right.

Won't work. The executable will still try to load specific version DirectX DLLs at runtime and will fail miserably in a cute file-not-found-oh-sh** manner.

I never thought about how to run Win9x games on recent systems. Hm. Virtualbox is, unfortunately, your best chance to get anything to work. Win98 installs aren't too hard to find on torrent search engines, since TPB is at a crawl recently, look at other places like Mininova or such.
Good luck.