Got my offsites sorted.
Cleaned up the cables and power situation with my server and desktop (it was a jungle back there after 7 years!)
Cleaned up and organized the inside of my desktop case, upgraded hard drives and video card and upgraded to 8.1.
Only thing left to do is redo my laptop and I'll be ready for regular compat testing again! woohoo
Laptop was bricked due to a bad bios flash (frickin HP!) back in November.
Ordered and received a Dell Inspiron 7537 and received it a week before the HP came back!
So last week I installed 2012R2 on the HP and I've resumed testing again.
Should have an updated list uploaded this weekend.
I tried Linux Mint on this Inspiron and it was horrible compared to 8.1 on the same machine (don't kill me).
Also tried Wine again and it still sucks so don't expect any testing from me using that any time soon.
This 7537 is frickin sweet but the touchpad is annoying.
9-29-2014
Updated list
Worked on fixing non-working games on Windows 2000.
Started testing games in Windows 8.1 using WARP. (Reason behind this is to see how compatible WARP is and this will make it extremly easy to identify when video card drivers screw up a game)
Working on finishing 7 64bit testing.
Also focusing on fixing non-working games with ports and unofficial fixes.
Need to go through list and consolidate to one virtualization solution (vmware) and use latest version for each OS (except 9x). (NT4 v4.5.3, 2000 v8, XP+ v10)
Next ver of Vmware supposedly removes 32bit host support 🙁
On the server side I'm almost done upgrading my server to 6TB drives so plenty of space for games!
Dragged some old laptops out of the closet:
Compaq Evo N600C P3 800
Thinkpad T40 2373 P3 1.5
I had previously upgraded the HD and memory in the Compaq a couple of years ago and also had a spare N600C which is good because that one appears to have several issues so I used the parts from that one to fix the other one and was able to verify that serveral 9x games that don't work in newer versions of Windows actually work fine in 9x.
For the Thinkpad I've orderd:
PSU
msata SSD
msata SSD to IDE adapter
2GB memory.
If the Thinkpad turns out to still work then the plan for these two laptops is that they will be used for 98SE/NT4 testing.
I'm also wondering if wined3d can be used on NT4 for D3D games.
Both laptops have Radeon Mobility video chipsets which support DX7 and OpenGL and support all the way up to Windows 7 (using XPDM drivers).
Well looks like the IBM is dead. Eventually I may tear it apart to figure out what's up.
On the plus side the following works fine on the Compaq:
Aleratec mSATA SSD to High Speed 9.5mm 2.5" IDE SSD Drive Converter Adapter with Frame
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00HZT4CFS/r … 0?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Samsung 840 EVO MZ-MTE1T0BW 1TB mSATA Internal SSD Single Unit Version
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00HWHVNUU/r … 0?ie=UTF8&psc=1
It's overkill to have this SSD in a P3 laptop but I wanted to see if it would work and how fast it would be and I can always repurpose the SSD in the future.
Windows 7 benches it at 6.1 and supposedly TRIM is enabled.
I do plan on using all of that 1TB for compatibility testing on this laptop so that's nice.
Now I wonder if I can use msata with my P2 laptop. heh
Had an issue this weekend where for some reason Acronis would hang when I could have swore I used the same ver of Acronis on this laptop before without issues (I have the original Acronis images I made years ago....)
Thinking it was the msata drive I put the old drive back in and same issue. Grrrr.
Put that ver Acronis in safe mode and it works fine but it's safe mode so I can't use USB or network.
Finally put the msata back in and loaded a newer ver of Acronis and it works fine.
Loaded my NT4 backup from a USB Blu-ray external drive and NT4 boots fine on the msata drive and it boots fast!
Updated 3-22-2015
Slowly going through ALL of my DOS games and setting them up with DOSBox and I have MUCH more that is not on the list.
Once done I'll add them all to both my compatibility list and the dosbox.com list.
Updated.
Currently syncing Steam/GOG/Origin games
Then going to verify which I've made capable of running offline.
I've recently purchased a new laptop for a upcoming deployment which will also help with game testing.
Will have the list of Linux Steam games up soon. Going through them now. Amazing how many require steam pretty sad.
Spinning this back up. Currently going through all the retail and online store games and verifying that the cracks and updates work and currently verifying that they do or do not work with Windows 2000 with Blackwingcat as a minimum. Any game that needs Blackwingcat files will be noted as such.
Currently on the compatibility list some of the games have hexedit modification from before Blackwingcat kernel became a thing so debating getting rid of those or moving them out of the list. If you're going to run a game on 2000 that wasn't made for 2000 then you should really use the Blackwingcat kernel otherwise you're in for a world of hurt.
Also reorganizing my 25TB of games by extracting the files from the Windows images, installing and backing up the installed folder as well as the patched game.
Still not sure what to do about Windows 10 since it's a moving target and I'm not about to test every game on every version of Windows 10. Possibly testing on LTS may be ideal but home users don't test LTSB. May just use the latest version and stick with it for testing for 5yrs?
if you choose the latest version you have to be aware of the bugs not fixed yet, or not introduced yet 😉
The no longer supported ones are kind of safest from the point of view of stable results in the base. 😉
