Seems to me that, on hardware at least, developers will try to include a factor of safety in the minimum requirements. But I would think that the OS requirements would be hard and fast... however, I have encountered some of the same situations.

I typically listen to the minimum requirements, but this is the first time time I ever had this happen to me! Either they lie about minimum requirements to force upgrades, or they don't bother testing the game that low, or they aren't allowed to say that the game will work on Windows 95 because Micro$oft chose to drop support on New Year's Eve 2001.

I never ran win98 back when it was current, I went from 95 OSR2 straight to 2000. It was my experience that just about everything that "required" win98 ran fine on 95. I do remember having to copy in some newer libraries from 98/ME and spoof the OS version a couple of times but that was rare.

xjas wrote:

I never ran win98 back when it was current, I went from 95 OSR2 straight to 2000. It was my experience that just about everything that "required" win98 ran fine on 95. I do remember having to copy in some newer libraries from 98/ME and spoof the OS version a couple of times but that was rare.

That's good to hear! I really don't like Windows 98, so it's nice to know that it won't hurt to try bending 95 over a bit... heheh

Though it also depends. I tried running Audacity (2006) and Nero Burning ROM (2003) and they both gave an error message refusing to install on 95. I wonder how you "trick" them into installing...

You'd think there would be a utility analogous to DOSVER which would set your reported Windows version.

computergeek92 wrote:

Though it also depends. I tried running Audacity (2006) and Nero Burning ROM (2003) and they both gave an error message refusing to install on 95. I wonder how you "trick" them into installing...

There is a way to do it, unfortunately I don't remember how. 😜 It might have been a "permanent" thing I did by replacing some system file or other with its win98 version.

Audacity has a zip (no installer) distribution, try that.

There's many of these. Doom3 infamously "required" Windows XP but could have a couple bytes hexed to work on 98 just fine. (At the time in 2004, Far Cry and Half-Life 2 worked on W98 out of the box, so...)

Resident evil 4 will play on win98 with a high end piii system.
AoE 3 will play on 98 too.

computergeek92 wrote:

That's good to hear! I really don't like Windows 98, so it's nice to know that it won't hurt to try bending 95 over a bit... heheh

I don't really like Windows 95, so it's nice to know that early Windows games do also run on Win3.1+W32s. 😉

usually what makes a game "require" Windows 98 over 95 is a dependency on Winsock2 since that's generally shipped installed by default on them, and while that can also be installed on Windows 95, it's a real pain to do so with the official package Microsoft supports.

and for the later games, DX8.1 and 9 since those don't install on 95.

Hey! I beat my record for the slowest possible CPU that can run Age of Empires ROR! It is the SZ933 (Intel 80486 overdrive 66 MHz) which seems to not be a Pentium Overdrive, but a real 486DX2 66! So it appears that AOE does not require the P5 architecture after all.. As for gameplay, I can play 2 player games on tiny maps, but when I start a new game configured this way it is lagging a little bit. I have not tested larger maps, but they may be too slow to be playable. It is truly amazing that a CPU first released in 1992 can play a game from 1997/1998! So indeed, the REAL CPU requirement for AOE is not a Pentium 90, any 486DX2 66 system can play it as long as it has 16MB of ran. I recall it not loading with any less. But great value for the time! Now I’m curious to try it on my 486DX 40 or my 486DX2 50... Testing games this way is a fun way to benchmark old systems!

Cool! 😁 Reminds me of me playing ST:TNG - A Final Unity on a 486DLC with an ULSI math co-pro!
It worked astonishingly well for what it was. Just the 3D scenes were a bit too much for it to handle..
And the combat modes in space were unplayable in my opinion.

Played FarCry on a Geforce 256 SDR it wasn't fast but it worked below minimum, I also tried Watch Dogs on a Core 2 Duo, it works but again sluggishly.

I recently beat Prey on my supercharged PIII machine. Ran quite well, too.

Minimum: 2GHz P4, 512MB, GF3
Recommended: 2.53GHz P4, 1GB, GF6800/X800
Supercharged PIII: 1.58GHz, 2GB DDR, GF6800GT

Doom3 requires a Geforce4MX supported minimum (Carmack targeted this for its then ubiquitousness) but you can fly it on a GF256/GF2 just fine.

candle_86 wrote:

I also tried Watch Dogs on a Core 2 Duo, it works but again sluggishly.

Pretty much every modern game qialifies for this thread, since they all have i5's in the minimum requirements, but will run (and often quite well) on a machine with a C2D.

Those early Pentiums like the 133 still had trouble playing the video intros in AOE ROR. I think this was a pretty MMX-hungry game.

Jo22 wrote:

Cool! 😁 Reminds me of me playing ST:TNG - A Final Unity on a 486DLC with an ULSI math co-pro!
It worked astonishingly well for what it was. Just the 3D scenes were a bit too much for it to handle..
And the combat modes in space were unplayable in my opinion.

The 486 was not known for good 3D acceleration due to it's old design. Same as ISA video cards were not so good versus PCI based video cards. The Pentiums rocked their socks off in 3D.