The problems I have with xp seem to be more due to graphics card and/or driver issues, or because some games have to be run with admin rights. Like, duh, kids like games and developers think I'll give my kids free reign over the computer?

There was some discussion of this matter in Games: when do you stop using Windows 98, and start using Windows XP? , but I guess it didn't get very far.

Other games not listed there that come to mind are the unpatched Final Fantasy VII (which ran into some weird kind of memory issue in XP) and the unpatched Amber: Journeys Beyond, and possibly The Residents: Bad Day on the Midway and Freak Show (both of which used a similar engine to Amber).

It would be nice to have a comprehensive list of problematic games, but as Mr. Ratfink says, it could be hard to separate XP problems from driver or admin rights problems.

I'm not too familiar with these OpenGL problems, but it seems to me those would almost certainly be driver issues.

Other games not listed there that come to mind are the unpatched Final Fantasy VII (which ran into some weird kind of memory issue in XP)

Final Fantasy 7 is quite painful to run on win XP. I also experimented with higher resolution and higher quality textures patches with it but overall it still didn't look very good.
I actually recommended getting a PlayStation copy and running it through an emulator, it was actually much more stable and on a powerful PC you can apply filtering settings to make it look much better.

I also remember trying to play Dark engine games like Thief and System Shock 2 had issues on Win XP and later, such as cutscene movies not playing. I think there is a loader available for these now that resolves these issues.

I rather play FF7 on a hacked bleemcast or something 😁
anyway... this is why dual booting is the best.. if the game doesn't work right in XP, boot into 98! I can only imagine half the dx games will work in XP, which will be better overall if it works

Final Fantasy VII at least needs the "TNT" patch (which lets it use DirectX) to get anywhere, as I recall. Here's the technical info on that memory crash if you're wondering.

More of the details of the specific problems plaguing System Shock 2 are here. They are strange and plentiful. But indeed, the best solution for SS2 and the other "Dark engine" games is DDfix.

Another prominently-patched game that comes to mind is Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, but I forget what the exact problem is there.

According to some patch I have:

Blood Omen

The problem was that the game tried to access the video hardware directly, which of course is forbidden in Win 2k.
Taking out the offending instruction seems to fix it though.
Ive only done limited testing, but the game seems to run fine now, except for some problems with the mouse cursor in the menu screens.

It's not just early games. Once you get another core there's another layer of issues, even DX9 games can get problematic.

'Upgrading' FF7's 'graphics' would be the last thing i'd want to do to get a game working. I gave up and play it on a Win9x machine with the ficedultra patch installed though (just psf music, nothing else changed). There's supposed to be a freeze around the Chocobo Racing bit on XP btw and I know a lot people play FF7 for the Golden Saucer....

Don't forget that FF7 is problematic on Windows in general, not just XP. It was an infamously unstable piece of work at the time, but since it was a game that made their Voodoo2s feel like they're worth their money (unlike say MEGAMAN X4 or anything else blitting 2d 🤣) it got a free pass on all the bugs it had, like Bethesda post '02

Also the only reason why early OpenGL games crash is because of the extension lists being excessive - since 2000, Nvidia loved to overadvertise them. You can get around it by the obscure option in the driver to limit the extensions, but this also happens on ATI as of late too... and they don't give you a choice. You can also use a D3D wrapper to limit in case your game isn't open source and fixed

Upgrading' FF7's 'graphics' would be the last thing i'd want to do to get a game working.

don't get me wrong, I wasn't trying to make it more stable, I just wanted it to look better... because on an LCD it looked terrible and ran at a very low resolution.
Even without graphical upgrades it was unstable.

Which is why I started playing it on a playstation emulator, looked better, less bugs and more stable 😀

leileilol wrote:

It's not just early games. Once you get another core there's another layer of issues, even DX9 games can get problematic.

That's interesting. Does any particular example come to mind?

I never had any kind of stability problems with FF7 back in the day, but then, my ATI Rage Pro was one of the officially-supported chipsets. My computer was too slow to sync the FMVs with the audio and/or sprites, but that's another issue.

Jorpho wrote:

That's interesting. Does any particular example come to mind?

Every Unreal engine game ever (there's only fixes for the more popular ones like Unreal, UT, Rune and Deus Ex), and Republic Commando (UE2) are just a few

leileilol wrote:

Jorpho wrote:

That's interesting. Does any particular example come to mind?

Every Unreal engine game ever (there's only fixes for the more popular ones like Unreal, UT, Rune and Deus Ex), and Republic Commando (UE2) are just a few

So unreal won't run correctly in XP?
I've just found a way to run Unreal in coop and want to give that a go in one of my future lan-parties 😁

Edit:Nvm, just reread what you wrote. Apparently there are fixes available 😀

I'd be interested to know the technical reasons behind the problem, but I can't seem to hit upon the right Google terms.

By the way, we can add Rebel Assault II, Chessmaster 4000 Turbo, and The Hive to the list, for having that SunmapLS problem as per The Chessmaster 4000 Turbo and Star Wars Rebel Assault II .

EDIT: Aha! Part of the riddle for that particular case is solved by searching for unmapls:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/195310

EDIT2: Actually, it could be that errors related to "unmapls" and such forth are due to something else entirely. I found these really nifty, long articles discussing in depth why Antietam and Gettysburg have problems... which were in fact derived from forum posts here. 😅
http://home.arcor.de/matvb/Antietam!_on_XP.html
http://home.arcor.de/matvb/Gettysburg!_on_XP.html
Maybe a similar analysis would reveal why those other games don't run. It makes sense in light of the solution posted in that other thread about changing the start directory.

Well, Might and Magic 7 also doesnt work on anything other then Win9x 😀

Which is in fact curious, since MM6 and 8 work on XP...

Well there are some XP games that only work on time accurate hardware.

e.g. Splinter Cell and the sequel pandora tomorrow use weird lightning / shadow features that apparently only old hardware and drivers can display. I believe a Geforce FX is required.

I forgot that Sonic CD was another one of those games that does not run in XP for vaguely understandable (but definitely fixable) reasons, namely its usage of LZ32.DLL:
http://forumsx.sonic-cult.org/index.php?showt … threaded&start=