What is the reason why old games don't work in XP? Is it because the computer itself is a faster machine? ...or XP just has a different setup where old games can't connect the right settings correctly on XP?
*SIGH for the neophites* MS-DOS was a monotasking operating system where most programs/games accessed hardware directly and there were many ways of doing it (it depended on programmers imagination). Modern operating systems don't allow this, because almost everything is sort of virtualised and you have to follow certain rules. I am sorry for this vague explanation, but constraining almost 20 years of Operating Systems would be quite a difficult task to accomplish.
Or to put it different: In MS-DOS a program (a game) could do just about anything it wanted with the hardware (and there was nothing to stop it).
And since there was only one program running at any one time, it did not have to follow any rules, except its own.
With newer (Windows) OS'es, where several programs can be running at the same time, a whole new set of rules is enforced by the OS. An old game, that does not know about these rules, blindy tries to access the hardware they way it has always done, and BAMM! the OS slaps it on the wrist and kills the program.
To a certain extent, Windows XP can be made to recognise such old-timers (and run them in what is known as compatibility modes), and will try to tweak and bend the new rules slightly to allow the old game to run. But it seldom works for really old games.
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MiniMax
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