this is very useful information

Here's another one for the Problematic Windows Games Ward. A more recent one.....for a change.
Need For Speed: Heat suffers from high CPU usage as it uses the infamous and much dreaded Frostbite graphics motor. And it's not just me alone; There are THOUSANDS of users that are running into such a malady without a definitive solution for the time being.......
Here's the thread entry from the official EA Forum right here: https://answers.ea.com/t5/NEED-FOR-SPEED-HEAT … ge/td-p/8422454

EDIT: SEGA Rally Championship 2 seems to hate modern gamepads -like Microsoft's XBOX S/X- as it won't detect the primary (the leftmost one) stick, therefore rendering it as unusable for steering as opposed to most racing/driving games that i've been sourcing for the past couple years. Not even thorough XInput though. #PleaseHelp

EDIT #2: Cabela's 4x4 Off Road Adventure 3 crashes back to the desktop on modern versions of Windows to a rather stupid memory limitation imposed by the developers. Quite annoying.

EDIT #3: The original TOCA Touring Car Championship (PC, Codemasters, 1997) installer just keeps shutting down on me as i try to install it on Windows 11. #FRUSTRATING

EDIT #4: Then again....another recent game. Need For Speed: Rivals (PC, Ghost Games/EA, 2013) won't run on 64-bit versions of Windows as its corresponding binaries suffer from bad DRM implementation. #StillUnfixed

Speedwarrior956 wrote on 2022-10-12, 03:58:

Here's another one for the Problematic Windows Games Ward. A more recent one.....for a change.
Need For Speed: Heat suffers from high CPU usage as it uses the infamous and much dreaded Frostbite graphics motor. And it's not just me alone; There are THOUSANDS of users that are running into into such a malady without a definitive solution for the time being.......
Here's the thread entry from the official EA Forum right here: https://answers.ea.com/t5/NEED-FOR-SPEED-HEAT … ge/td-p/8422454

Probably this doesn't match the criteria of the first post. Anyways, this is (was) a real issue and I had to follow the same steps. Frostbite has been used for way too long imo, and such inefficiencies will exist.

I'm surprised Necrovision and Necrovision: Lost Company haven't been mentioned yet. Both games frequently have gamebreaking bugs that haven't ever been fixed as far as I know. The worst seems to be that in chapter 6 of NV: LC, people often encounter a "script error" that can make further progress impossible. Strangely the games do work fine for some people even on Win10; it's not clear why the games are so broken for some but not others.

UPDATE: SEGA Rally 2 (SEGA, 1999) won't show its Device Settings prompt thorough the game's launcher as the required file -SR2_CPL.cpl- appears to be missing, thus making impossible to rebind them driving commands to either any joystick, gamepad or steering controller for that matter. #PleaseHelp

Speedwarrior956 wrote on 2023-04-14, 15:48:

UPDATE: SEGA Rally 2 (SEGA, 1999) won't show its Device Settings prompt thorough the game's launcher as the required file -SR2_C […]
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UPDATE: SEGA Rally 2 (SEGA, 1999) won't show its Device Settings prompt thorough the game's launcher as the required file -SR2_CPL.cpl- appears to be missing, thus making impossible to rebind them driving commands to either any joystick, gamepad or steering controller for that matter. #PleaseHelp

Most games of that era run the "Set up USB Game controllers" now. Maybe opening that is what you need.

No, SEGA Rally 2 has its very own control panel applet and can't install it.

Here's a possible workaround for Martin Mystère: Operation Dorian Gray
Issues with Martin Mystère: Operation Dorian Gray
And Sanitarium is now supported in ScummVM.

The 1998 game Gunmetal has been brought up in this forum thread before, though I noticed it's not on the OP thread list. I figured to add a bit of context that while the MS-DOS version is "more playable" than the Windows version, it has many performance demands that make it not ideal for emulation (neither DOSBox or PCem/86Box can handle the demands of the game at a decent framerate past the first few levels) versus the Windows version that, if it didn't run so fast, would readily be the better version of the game to play on modern machines.

We are still on the hunt for anyone with experience in writing wrappers and also has experience with timing issues in games such as this. It seems likely that the timing problem is due to the Windows version being a fast track port of the DOS codebase to Windows at the time. In fact, based on Draco's own testing in the past (and I was able to corroborate this at least once, as well), the DOS version itself can run too fast in certain scenarios which are very difficult to replicate besides on modern hardware with NTVDM as an example or, say, certain VM software when we've been able to get that to work. If anyone has any experience on this just reach out to me in DMs. Thanks.

alberthamik wrote on 2023-07-02, 04:12:

The 1998 game Gunmetal has been brought up in this forum thread before, though I noticed it's not on the OP thread list. I figured to add a bit of context that while the MS-DOS version is "more playable" than the Windows version, it has many performance demands that make it not ideal for emulation (neither DOSBox or PCem/86Box can handle the demands of the game at a decent framerate past the first few levels) versus the Windows version that, if it didn't run so fast, would readily be the better version of the game to play on modern machines.

We are still on the hunt for anyone with experience in writing wrappers and also has experience with timing issues in games such as this. It seems likely that the timing problem is due to the Windows version being a fast track port of the DOS codebase to Windows at the time. In fact, based on Draco's own testing in the past (and I was able to corroborate this at least once, as well), the DOS version itself can run too fast in certain scenarios which are very difficult to replicate besides on modern hardware with NTVDM as an example or, say, certain VM software when we've been able to get that to work. If anyone has any experience on this just reach out to me in DMs. Thanks.

I never tried it myself, although people have done something here:
https://sourceforge.net/p/dxwnd/discussion/ge … ead/0d6009cacc/

BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2023-07-02, 06:02:

I never tried it myself, although people have done something here:
https://sourceforge.net/p/dxwnd/discussion/ge … ead/0d6009cacc/

Lol yeah that was me who started that Dxwnd discussion. The Dxwnd time stretch option is not a very good one because it is not possible to get the time stretch precise for the game, AND it differs from system to system, plus it introduces some weird issues in certain places. I should note that we're trying to get a fix that is not dependent on manually setting the timing but instead just fixing the root of the problem so that the game performs the same regardless of system specs. The manual stretch also would not work very well for multiplayer which is another reason I'm writing it off. Someone had decided to bundle a patched copy of the game with the Dxwnd fix somewhere online, but it really is not ideal.

alberthamik wrote on 2023-07-02, 21:38:

BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2023-07-02, 06:02:

I never tried it myself, although people have done something here:
https://sourceforge.net/p/dxwnd/discussion/ge … ead/0d6009cacc/

Lol yeah that was me who started that Dxwnd discussion. The Dxwnd time stretch option is not a very good one because it is not possible to get the time stretch precise for the game, AND it differs from system to system, plus it introduces some weird issues in certain places. I should note that we're trying to get a fix that is not dependent on manually setting the timing but instead just fixing the root of the problem so that the game performs the same regardless of system specs. The manual stretch also would not work very well for multiplayer which is another reason I'm writing it off. Someone had decided to bundle a patched copy of the game with the Dxwnd fix somewhere online, but it really is not ideal.

You are right. The game depends on something for speed related to the cpu, probably clock. This was similar to Jane's USNF97. I tried to send the surface conversions to GDI, that's what fixed the speed for USNF across multiple computers, but it doesn't work here.

BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2023-07-03, 06:52:

You are right. The game depends on something for speed related to the cpu, probably clock. This was similar to Jane's USNF97. I tried to send the surface conversions to GDI, that's what fixed the speed for USNF across multiple computers, but it doesn't work here.

I've got older research from someone else but I'll share what a friend told me from their recent excursion on this (they are focused on just recovering function info to reverse scripts ATM, they don't have experience with wrappers):

1So, the Windows version sets its timing thread to realtime, the highest possible priority class. But I'd reckon this is a result of a hasty conversion job from DOS, due to it being an 11th hour inclusion. And even Microsoft discourages using realtime, saying this:
2You should almost never use REALTIME_PRIORITY_CLASS, because this interrupts system threads that manage mouse input, keyboard input, and background disk flushing. This class can be appropriate for applications that "talk" directly to hardware or that perform brief tasks that should have limited interruptions.
3Either way, the game checks how fast the timer is on the user's system when booting up. And it's very relevant to the game's input methods, as these rely on the timing thread to determine the polling rate for devices. So by the time you've entered the game proper, it's already set the rate at which the inputs register. Thus, independent from how fast the game itself renders.

EDIT: Forgot a paragraph.

Adding a game - Dylan Dog Horror Luna Park. The game last worked on Windows XP SP1, it needed the EmulateCDFS to eliminate some I/O errors and EmulateHeap to fix memory errors.

In Windows XP SP2 the game crashes due to memory errors.

The game got fixed again in 2016 in Windows 10 suddenly, and then broke again in some later release, all problem being in memory

Interstate '82 - Game crashes when player runs into anything while on foot. The flag EmulateHeap used to work on Windows XP and probably earlier versions of Win7, but now it makes the game crash upon starting any mission. Limiting the framerate stops the game from crashing (without EmulateHeap). I did so by forcing 64x AA and 8x Sparse Grid Supersampling. Tested with the GOG version.

Gravity Angels, in hardware accelerated mode uses W-buffer, something modern drivers don't support. Running this game in HW mode as in Intel or AMD, you will get z-order issues in textures while in Nvidia you will not see textures (personal tests).

Original 1998 CD-ROM PC release of Glover. While it does work on dgVoodoo 2.x, it doesn't perform the best as opposed to the intended hardware it would have run on and seems to require very SPECIFIC graphics cards and drivers. Also from what I've tried it does not play nicely on older systems that are from after the game and the supported cards for it came out, especially if you can't run dgVoodoo. So basically to get the best results with it you'd have to spend your net worth on a Voodoo2.

You can cross Mechwarrior 2 off the list - as long as people use the titanium edition

I wrote an installer posted here:
Re: A comprehensive guide to install and play MechWarrior 2 on new versions on Windows.

Not sure if you will consider this as following the criteria, but since the two .dll that do CD-check is removed from Windows (since 8?), you can't play Rome: Total War and Medieval Ii: Total War (including Gold Edition) on Windows 10.
However you can enter your serial/CD-key in Steam ("Add games with key" or something like that) to get it there.

Now it is a while ago I did it with mine, and since then there have been launched a Remaster of Rome, but usually a key don't expire (in some cases they do if the game is removed).
Also bear in mind that if you have a second hand game this may have been done already.

This also worked for me on Origin on the following games:
Need For Speed: Undercover
Sims: Medieval (had to be done on a specific Sims 3 page.

Silent Hill 2 PC doesn't like multicore machines - there is a SH2EE project (https://enhanced.townofsilenthill.com/SH2/) which fixes most of the issues including that.

All claims of any bugs are clearly fake news, as we would never had left any bugs in it on release 😉