It would be great to have one but someone would have to setup, manage and moderate it.

This one?

@leileilol, along the same lines except:

* Windows games as well as DOS games (as it's pretty easy to get DOS games working due to DOS Box)
* Detailed instructions for the non technical (I often see people who aren't hardcore gamers who obviously only have 1 or 2 games they really want to get going but don't really know how to use DOS box)
* A section on how to get the game up to modern standards (if possible) for example, how to make the game widescreen.
* A brief description of the game.

I thought about this but there are a few challenges.

Especially with windows. What if you guide uses XP but someone reading the guide has Vista or 7? There are just way to many variables here to make this feasable.

DOSBox is good because once it runs, it's the same for everyone.

For windows games you can fix most issues by googling the problem. The problem about instructions for non technical people is that getting many W98 games to work under XP, well the steaps aren't easy and unless someone writes a patch, it will neber be something trivial.

e.g. I had a look at System Shock 2 and I just gave up as it was way too confusing.

With DOSBox however, once you know how to use it you have immediate access to a massive library of games. There are frontends like D-Fend reloaded which make it super easy for the average Jo to get started.

So yea in a nutshell I believe such a database is just not feasable to maintain. Even if you start such a database, the information per game would have to be quite short in order to add new games. So from the get go you would have to make a compromize.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

DOSBox is good because once it runs, it's the same for everyone.

except for mac users, and the elusive win95 user who runs it on an actual machine capable of playing dos games just fine.

leileilol wrote:

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

DOSBox is good because once it runs, it's the same for everyone.

except for mac users, and the elusive win95 user who runs it on an actual machine capable of playing dos games just fine.

Well there you go...

Do you include Mac users and older OSes in that games compatibility wiki?

It's just way too much work...

I was thinking each game's profile would look something like this:

Description (brief paragraph explaining what the game is about with a box shot)

Original system requirements (this comes into my definition of a compatibility issue. My definition is any game breaking error which is caused by software or hardware that has come about after the release of the game. For example, a game designed to work on Windows 2000 would not have a section about how to make it work on 95 or 98 )

Issues (a list of issues the game has, sorted by the software or hardware that causes them and an other section if the cause is unknown).

Solutions (when a solution is found for a problem it is removed from the issues list and placed onto the solutions list)

Modern Conveniences (patches and advice for getting the game to run in widescreen etc).

Also on the wiki they'd be a section about how to run a dos game through DOS box with the provided config file, a section on how to get games to run in ScummVM and basic troubleshooting (compatibility mode etc).

I know it's a lot of work, but surely the joy of a wiki is that as long as people know about it, it'll grow without a small group having to moderate it?

It would be a LOT of work to create and update it. Maintaining it would be a nightmare!
Perhaps it's best to concentrate on a smaller area to keep it manageable.

ntcompatible.com is still around, isn't it?

The problem is indeed not only XP/Vista/7, but the wide range of different hardware and driver configurations out there that may cause problems.

I've never found NT compatible to be particularly useful, I'm not sure I've ever managed to fix a problem from it.

The OSes that solutions are provided for will be limited to current OSes (e.g. Vista, 7, maybe XP). The hardware and drivers may cause a problem but I'd say it's rare that a game has more than one issue (very few games have driver compatibility problems and recent OS problems tend to apply to both Vista and 7).

You should add there list of unsolved compatibility issues, so geeks with plenty of time could try to solve them. I like to play X-Wing Alliance again, but this game keeps having broken fonts on nvidia never than FX series (maybe theres solution in changing some driver settings, but never found it). Seen some other old games having this kind of issues on new PC (broken or mising textures). Also some screenshot uploading system would be nice - or at last linking option, so people can post screenshots of errors.
And add there statistics for major graphic manufacturers - some kind of counters, so flame can start who is worse in driver support - amd(Ati) vs nvidia vs matrox vs S3.
Think this is doable by some kind of tag system - users just tag game by incompactible HW and some system counter then show number in statistic counter on main page. For less number of combinations just set it as generations - for example all nvidia cards, riva series, geforce 1/2/4mx, geforce 3, geforce 4ti, geforce fx, geforce 6x, geforce 7x....

Yeah, that's kind of what I was thinking. If problems were grouped together in one place there would be a wider base of people with the technical knowledge to fix problems. You could even try and implement some kind of system whereby people who solved problems would receive points or something.

Lord Uber Dowzen wrote:

The OSes that solutions are provided for will be limited to current OSes (e.g. Vista, 7, maybe XP). The hardware and drivers may cause a problem but I'd say it's rare that a game has more than one issue (very few games have driver compatibility problems and recent OS problems tend to apply to both Vista and 7).

Well, the thing is, with an open wiki you might get one guy who finds that a game has a legitimate problem with a particular driver revision, but you'll get some other guy who installed buggy webcam drivers that are interfering with his sound card in subtle ways, and some other guy whose computer is just loaded to the gills with spyware, and some other guy saying "durr teh gaem dont work cuz I dunno wut a rar file is".

And quite a few games have driver compatibility problems, if I'm not mistaken, at least with older versions of the nVidia drivers. Heck, one of the most annoying problems I can recall was running Grim Fandango under Windows 98 SE with the WDM SB PCI drivers instead of the older revision.

I was thinking about things like that, you'd probably have to have a system where a problem would have to be verified (e.g. at least 2 people would have to be having the problem before it's added to the list). I completely agree that it wouldn't work for games which seem to have compatibility issues with everything but it'd be great for games that have 1 or 2 issues.

If it's a compatibility wiki for each game then you shouldn't refuse any information from being added to the list any and all information could potentially be usefull.

What is really annoying is if you have a ton of games on your list that you do not personally own and can not verify and the user submitted it and there's no way to verify it since you cannot contact them or they refuse to communicate. This is why I was considering just recruiting from the vogons/mobygames/etc community if they've been a part of it for a certain number of years and compile a list of everyone's games.....

Also if the submittal process is too complicated then users won't submit anything and as you can see by the stats on NTCompatible submittals are waaaayy down compared to NT4/2000....NTCompatible is about as simple as it gets for submittals although it's kind of buried in the site.

Whenever I've had thoughts of making a wiki out of my list I just have nightmares.....I like things to be "perfect" but there is not and never can be a "perfect" compatibility wiki. Best bet would be to study wikipedia\mobygames methods for organization of information.

NTCompatible uses a star based rating system but the user submits how many stars on submittal.
http://www.ntcompatible.com/compatdb/submitre … es_windows.html

DosFreak wrote:

If it's a compatibility wiki for each game then you shouldn't refuse any information from being added to the list any and all in […]
Show full quote

If it's a compatibility wiki for each game then you shouldn't refuse any information from being added to the list any and all information could potentially be usefull.

What is really annoying is if you have a ton of games on your list that you do not personally own and can not verify and the user submitted it and there's no way to verify it since you cannot contact them or they refuse to communicate. This is why I was considering just recruiting from the vogons/mobygames/etc community if they've been a part of it for a certain number of years and compile a list of everyone's games.....

Also if the submittal process is too complicated then users won't submit anything and as you can see by the stats on NTCompatible submittals are waaaayy down compared to NT4/2000....NTCompatible is about as simple as it gets for submittals although it's kind of buried in the site.

Whenever I've had thoughts of making a wiki out of my list I just have nightmares.....I like things to be "perfect" but there is not and never can be a "perfect" compatibility wiki. Best bet would be to study wikipedia\mobygames methods for organization of information.

NTCompatible uses a star based rating system but the user submits how many stars on submittal.
http://www.ntcompatible.com/compatdb/submitre … es_windows.html

Thanks for the feedback!

I agree that accepting all information would be best, but I'd make the argument that if no one on the site could verify the information it probably isn't a game people are really excited about getting working. At the very least though anyone would be able to access that information it just wouldn't be at the top of the page.

I agree with that the submittal process needs to be as simple as possible. I'm pretty sure you can set up wikis so that you don't need to log in to edit (that IP address will be banned if they vandalize the site). A form that created the page would be even better, and probably not that difficult to implement.

Looking over NT compatible a bit, I think one of the things that might make this wiki possible is the fact that we would only list games that have problems. NT compatible seems to list games that don't have issues whereas this wiki would be limited to games that have problems. Hopefully that would limit the workload a bit.