PC/Troubleshooting

Here are some tips to make old PC games run on modern systems.

Graphical Troubleshooting for Vista and Windows 7 users
Chances are, you own either Windows Vista or Windows 7 and you want to play some of the games on this list. Most of these games are old games, and unless you bought them from GOG you might have one trouble that is easy to solve. This issue fucks up some colors in some of these old games, turning them into a fucked up color scheme. It was believed to be a GPU issue, but it's not, apparently. Because there's a very easy method to solve this. We'll be using Starcraft: Brood War as an example. Now, let's try and launch the game.

STRAIGHT AND SIMPLE: OPEN THE GAME, PRESS CTRL+SHIFT+ESC, CLOSE THE "explorer.exe" PROCESS AND YOU ARE GOOD

OR BETTER YET IN THE MIDDLE OF THOSE TWO ON HUGE LAZY FAGGOT METER DO THIS Note: In starcraft this graphical bug is only in the menus and not in game.

Make a notepad file

'taskkill /f /IM explorer.exe C:\"Program Files (x86)"\"StarCraft"\"Starcraft.exe" start explorer.exe '

Save as Starcraft.bat

Replace middle line with wherever your starcraft file is.

This works for AoE, Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds and a bunch of older games.

ERROR Workaround for 32/64 bit Vista and Windows 7 users
Do you get tired of seeing this shit when you get the urge to play that old win98 game that started you on your vidya journey?



well there is a way around that. First download and install VMware Player which lets you run a virtual OS. Free

http://www.vmware.com/products/player/



Next, run that shit. You need either an older windows 95/98/XP etc DISC or ISO for this to work. Just use XP, will run most 95/98 games anyway.



1. Create New Virtual Machine

2. Select install from disc if you have the old OS in your CD/DVD Drive or browse for your ISO

3. Type in the serial you have, select disc space on you hdd that you will allocate for the virtual OS, and then install

4. You can customize the specs of your virtual machine by selecting customize hardware. Don't be stupid

and select 64 gigs of ram, 8 processing cores, etc for an old ass win98 machine. Select something below the maximum recommended specs and generally use common sense.

5. Click finish and the Virtual OS will run, should be easy to figure out how to get back to your desktop(hint: the big ass toolbar at the top). Anyway, the virtual machine will now proceed to actually install windows XP on the space you allocated on your hdd earlier.

6. Browse /v/, do whatever, wait for the installation to finish.

should look something timilar to this when everything is done:



7. Select your resolution and it should run like normal windows. NOTE: The virtual OS has direct access to your CD/DVD drive but not your hard drive. If you want it to have direct access to your hard drive, you have to use the tool bar above. Player --> Manage --> virtual machine settings --> Add... --> Hard Disc --> Use a physical Disc -->

select your physical HDD or wherever your game is on --> finish. Now your Virtual OS has direct access to your physical HDD

8. Install desired game and enjoy!

OpenGL games may crash on nVidia cards
Some games that use OpenGL renderer like Anachronox may crash immediately on modern cards/drivers. It seems to help to modify "Extension limit" parameter, whatever it could mean. First, go to regular nVidia control panel and create new profile for game's exe file. You may want to also set antialiasing and vsync while you're there. Next, get the latest nVidia Inspector, go to driver settings, select your game profile, click "Show unknown settings" (magnifying glass) and set "Extension limit" under Common to 0x000011A8 (pick from dropdown list to not to screw up). That's it.

Some games are only compatible with Xbox 360 controllers
Contact the game's developer and berate him for his incompetence. Meanwhile, use x360ce to make the game think your generic gamepad is an X360 controller.