Without being able to think of any specific ones at the moment, there are a few. You'll never get 100% compatibility on a single setup when PC gaming.

And virtualized XP really is not that good for gaming.

I usually encountering some difficulty with older DX7 games with somekind CD-Rom DRM, they works flawlessly on win9x,
but they would exihibit some kind of glitch on XP even so if the XP are on VM.
Most of those games need patches/or Compatibility-Shims to works properly on XP.

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There's been threads like this before... buried somewhere in VOGONS. 😒

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Are you expecting someone here to have tried every video game in existence? The list you're looking for does not exist. Assuming you don't care about say, Zombie Wars, what purpose does it serve you to know wither it runs in XP or not?

Planning for 100% compatibility is pointless, it's pretty much impossible on a single PC platform and the closer you get the more you'll realize you spend more time on figuring out how to play games than rather just playing them.

Worry about the problem cases when you get to them. Play the games you want to play now.

How about this?

PC Game Compatibility List

Here's a few threads:
Win9x games that don't work on XP
Old Win9x games on WinXP - is it just early DirectX games that can be problematic?
Games: when do you stop using Windows 98, and start using Windows XP?
Are there still PC games that we can't run?
PC Game Compatibility List

A lot of these break down into "okay, THAT game doesn't work out of the box, but there's a fan-made patch that will fix it."

Overall I must concur with ZellSF's summary: worry about the problem cases as you find them.

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Abysmal wrote:

I could do without the amateur snark (oh yes, please play them ALL!) and trite, obvious philosophy lessons. Thanks to the ones pointing me in the right direction.

Anyways I think I've already found an example with these QuickTime games like Traitors Gate, they have audio distortion on OSes above 98. Still, I've got them running in Daum. I'd love to contribute to the code of some of these new projects like Daum and PCem and really prop up this sorely needed "middle" era of gaming.

Do you want a few examples, a list of all "significant" games or a list of all games that don't work in XP?

Telling us exactly what you want and as importantly why is pretty important. Again none of those lists actually exist, but if you have a good reason for needing them then that might motivate people into trying to come up with them.

Also, what exactly is your criteria for "don't run". Audio distortion fits under it apparently...

And since you're running Win95 in DOSBox, should we exclude Windows titles that runs under that? What's the performance criteria where you no longer consider it running under that?

Those weren't philosophy lessons btw, I was trying to tell you you might have a problem that's way too common in gamers: overthinking this.

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Abysmal wrote:

ZellSF wrote:

And virtualized XP really is not that good for gaming.

Then you've never experienced recent versions of Parallels for Mac; that software performs bloody miracles. Not just XP gaming but 2010s gaming as well.

I'm just about at 100% on a single laptop but it's this middle 3.1/9x section that's painful. I've rigged up a DOSBox Daum with Win98 but transferring ISOs is needlessly complicated and its flaky as hell. I feel like switching to XP would be smoother even if the games needed fixes. And games with DRM that can be hacked away don't count, I want examples of old unavailable games that cannot be made to run in XP under ANY circumstance.

Last time I checked VMWare benchmarked even higher than Parallels for gaming, but even so it's a big hit vs running bare metal. You also lose things like EAX, though that's not going to matter on a laptop of course.

Couple titles I couldn't run even properly under XP VM

Star Trek - Generations (Flickering graphics in VMWare, wouldn't run in Windows 7)
Fighting Force (Just plain won't start, VM or otherwise)
Mortyr 2093-1944 (too fast in WIndows 10, DirectDraw function unsupported in VMWare XP VM, might be fixable with RivaTuner frame rate limiter, need to investigate)
Midtown Madness (Starts in Windows 10 but runs like a dog, doesn't work in VMWare XP VM, runs on bare metal XP)

Not running under a VM is also a thing to consider. There are GPU compatibility issues and I doubt the emulated GPU isn't subject to any of them. There's also sound compatibility issues to think of under VMs (A3D, EAX?)...

I don't particularly like the VM approach since I've never seen it done without any audio latency (makes sense that there would be audio latency) or exclusive fullscreen support (being a slave to the OS' composition manager). That and VM's generally being prohibited from changing host resolution or incorporating any image scaling.

Really not a fan of VM gaming. As a last option, sure, but not when you have better alternatives.

If you want to play old games that will not work on the newer systems then I suggest finding an old machine. Look into Ebay or thrift stores or build one yourself.

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catchaserguns wrote:

If you want to play old games that will not work on the newer systems then I suggest finding an old machine. Look into Ebay or thrift stores or build one yourself.

Get thee away from this subforum, Marvin'er. This is ye olde VOGONS -> Windows. "Getting old Windows games working." ON NEW SYSTEMS.
Very Old Games On New Systems. VOGONS. 😉

Hidden and Dangers doesn't work properly on XP.

You will think the game works fine until you get to the vehicle chase level after the escape from the labour camp level.

However, then you start driving and come across germans who fire off a whole mp40 clip in about 2 seconds in a jerky crazy manner.

I don't think this affects the deluxe version but i cannot remember.
However it is still important as the original version is actually a lot better than the deluxe version. In the deluxe version, all the soldiers have the same face texture because they updated the engine but didn't port over support for models to be able to choose from different textures.
Levels and music are also changes and you can no longer blow up into separate body parts etc either.

I am guessing Fight for Freedom has this same issue somewhere too.

I haven't got a chance to install windows 98 to install the games on that to see if it helps.
It's a very strange issue though! I wonder what could cause it. I doubt graphics cards cos it seems more a strange timing issue?
Or maybe it could be that the FPS is too high and so it could work on windows XP if i had a way of reducing the FPS? I never thought of that or even tried it - does anyone know of an FPS capping application to try it?

Abysmal wrote:

Anyways I think I've already found an example with these QuickTime games like Traitors Gate, they have audio distortion on OSes above 98. Still, I've got them running in Daum. I'd love to contribute to the code of some of these new projects like Daum and PCem and really prop up this sorely needed "middle" era of gaming.

PCem's one generation of emulated CPU off to fill this gap. It's pretty nice handling p166-200 3dfx win9x gaming for me so far though 😀

Daum's dead, and buggy, and DOSbox should never be considered for Windows 9x software/games anyway.

also I still use VirtualPC 2007 for trying non-3d non-fullscreen Win31/Win9x games quickly (as well as djgpp compiling). It's the most excellent VM for Win9x guests IMO

Abysmal wrote:

RetroArch has a great CRT filter and I love running dosbox through that (Zeliard with dithering!).

Doesn't RetroArch cause massive input lag though? At least, i remember it being way inferior than just running Nestopia or other emulators stand alone.

I wish there was a good way you could apply display filters to everything though.
I mean, there is no emulator that provides good ways to do integer scaling, configurable amounts of horizontal blurring (for dither effects) and custom user definable pixel aspect ratios (for each game).

The custom pixel aspect ratios and integer scaling is the crappest problem. I just want to be able to pixel double/triple to the nearest integer, then add an appropriate amount of scan lines (1/3 to 1/2 of the integer scale - whichever fits x % == 0;) and then aspect ratio correct the result using linear filtering. This would usually be done on the horizontal plane but should be configurable as dos games would be better stretched vertically for example (in fact they were).

The reason the pixel aspect needs to be configurable is that games rarely agree on what it should be. A lot use 1:1 which is good even if they would look wrong back in the day because of it. Others are way debatable. You have to look at the graphics to really guess. The best way is to try and find something very large you know is meant to be circular and count the pixels.

Also, when games are ported from platforms that tends to mess up the par on the target platform, so if a console game was ported to pc, you wouldn't really want a par of 1:1.2 which would but the usual artist target for 320*200, as console games for tvs had different par targets generally and due to tvs, the target was a lot more variable.

I don't know why i'm talking about this here, i should make another topic 😳 So i'll stop now! haha

Also, steam controller? Ewwww touchpads! :p