While it is true that many games can run, they often do not run that well on modern day hardware. Especially the older games. Before getting my hp p3 800mhz win 98 gaming system for example I tried to get running some games on modern hardware and it was often a mess. Some games like Shogo Mobile Suit Armor for example run in theory on windows 11 but the game crushes very often. Some games like Jagged Alliance 2 do not run at all.

And even in the x area some games might not run that well. While Fear runs quite fine it is missing some featues like EAX sound which could help to enhance the atmosphere a lot. I do just heard some EAX demos on youtube (do not have a dedicated xp gaming rig yet) but it felt much better than running FEAR on my ryzen 3 with geforce 3070.

I also had some issues with Far Cry. In general it was running ok but it looked much worse than the footage of contemporary hardware.

if you are rest refering to glide games op then the answer might differ. Most glide games look quite well with wrappper but there also expections.

I can enhance dark forces jedi 2 for example but could not get the ingame music working.

So we are back to a good mix of os, older hardware, and emulators wappers on modern system to get everything running. I mean, this is why I built my system with 98 v3 and xp with hd5770. That with my modern 5950x, rx6750 rig with pcem, I can play all the games I want in mostly their optimal configuration.

I challenge the idea that retro hardware is required to get any game running in an acceptable way. Sure for games that stream music off the disc or for EAX enahancement that can be hard to get working, but even then it's often not still possible

Shobo Mobile Suit Armor
https://www.gog.com/forum/shogo_mobile_armor_ … to_vs_dgvoodoo2

Alchemy should work with most EAX games, including apparently FEAR
https://archive.org/details/creative-alchemy-all-versions

Jagged Alliance 2 Community Patch/overhaul
https://ja2-stracciatella.github.io/

Star Wars Dark Forces II
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Star_Wars:_ … _Dark_Forces_II

Far Cry has worked fine for me, but it's worth noting that I had issues on XP hardware with certain effects depending on all kinds of variables like patch version and the particular graphics card and driver.

Nevertheless, the pcgaming wiki page
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Far_Cry

There are some unofficial patches that are worth exploring.

You are probably right, but their is nothing like having a v3 playing some old games natively. Call me old fashion 😉

mothergoose729 wrote on 2023-06-18, 20:11:

I challenge the idea that retro hardware is required to get any game running in an acceptable way. Sure for games that stream mu […]
Show full quote

I challenge the idea that retro hardware is required to get any game running in an acceptable way. Sure for games that stream music off the disc or for EAX enahancement that can be hard to get working, but even then it's often not still possible

Shobo Mobile Suit Armor
https://www.gog.com/forum/shogo_mobile_armor_ … to_vs_dgvoodoo2

Alchemy should work with most EAX games, including apparently FEAR
https://archive.org/details/creative-alchemy-all-versions

Jagged Alliance 2 Community Patch/overhaul
https://ja2-stracciatella.github.io/

Star Wars Dark Forces II
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Star_Wars:_ … _Dark_Forces_II

Far Cry has worked fine for me, but it's worth noting that I had issues on XP hardware with certain effects depending on all kinds of variables like patch version and the particular graphics card and driver.

Nevertheless, the pcgaming wiki page
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Far_Cry

There are some unofficial patches that are worth exploring.

So, first off, it's amazing that the community has put so much effort into keeping old games playable on modern systems.

I still got tired of dealing with it. I have a huge library of 90's and early 00's Win9X games that I loved as a kid and regularly revisit. Having to trawl through the pcgaming wiki, community forums, etc for hours, attempt their numerous solutions to varying degrees of efficacy, and then settle for the least bad one adds a serious frustration for a game that, if I'm being honest, I'm likely only to play for 30 minutes to 2 hours for my nostalgia fix and then move on.

And that's assuming some random Win10 update didn't bork the previously documented compatibility solution. For a while I was running WinXP in an older version of VirtualBox that still supported the guest extensions that added 3d acceleration support. At some point, I went to fire it up to play a game that would only reliably work, and work best, in a VM and suddenly the whole thing was busted. At some point somehow my operating system quit supporting it's method of hypervisor. And that's on top of the frustration of going to install VirtualBox one day and do my usual WinXP VM with 3D Acceleration only to find out that functionality had been removed, necessitating the need to download an older version in the first place.

Keeping old windows games running on modern hardware just felt too much like fighting the tide.

Have to agree. It is impressive what the community has done to keep old stuff alive on new hardware but i find it way more hassle free to play the stuff on the hardware these games were meant to played. Alt least sort off. I also like old hardware that's why I will be the owner of a win 98se P 400 mhz system soon.

I am also more in the original hardware camp and I am very content with my p2 400 MHz system that arrived last Monday I am still impressed by how many solutions are out there to make the old stuff work on modern hardware. Especially the solution for EAX sound is cool. My mere Windows 98 pc has no EAX support, of course, but if I ever build myself an xp gaming rig, an EAX card would be one main requirement. But now I am very eager to try out to get EAX working on my current modern pc.

It's unfortunate that dgVoodoo 2 does not work on XP 🙁 Can someone provide a list of wrappers that I may need?

Actually, the only reason you would need a wrapper on xp is for glide. Try nGlide or alternatively dgVoodoo 1. For directx, win xp supports dx9.0c very well and it is higly retro compatible with dx6 to dx8. I can't speak for dx5 and below since I mostly play these games on win98, but I know that many will work just fine.

gnn wrote on 2023-06-19, 13:31:

Actually, the only reason you would need a wrapper on xp is for glide. Try nGlide or alternatively dgVoodoo 1. For directx, win xp supports dx9.0c very well and it is higly retro compatible with dx6 to dx8. I can't speak for dx5 and below since I mostly play these games on win98, but I know that many will work just fine.

"DirectX 5" is mostly DirectDraw games. DirectDraw 5 doesn't seem to work very well on last Windows XP supported video cards (I f*ck*d an nvidia 8600GT running Age of Empires 2 due overheating 😳), so find one which fully supports it. Geforce4 MX seems to be the right spot for those games. As alternative (if your game supports it), you can run it through some of those wined3d DirectDraw wrappers, or some QEMU build which supports wineD3D to OpenGL translation (for such DirectX 5 and older games i don't recommend VBox or VMware at all).

How the hell did you burn a card on direct draw? I can understand not working right, but burning it is puzzling, unless your cooling or OC was not to par.

Anyways, if high end cards do not work well, window XP will hapilly support a second video card, i don't think there are pcie models ot GF4 mx, but one could get an older pcie card like a GF6200 or 6800, if pci or agp slots are not available.

gnn wrote on 2023-06-19, 16:13:

How the hell did you burn a card on direct draw? I can understand not working right, but burning it is puzzling, unless your cooling or OC was not to par.

Anyways, if high end cards do not work well, window XP will hapilly support a second video card, i don't think there are pcie models ot GF4 mx, but one could get an older pcie card like a GF6200 or 6800, if pci or agp slots are not available.

I was interested in XP build with two cards: 750 Ti and FX 5500 PCI, but it seems they can't work together since they should have the same driver..

Oh, yeah you are correct. I spoke too fast.... You would need your second card from a different manufacturer, like an ATI card. I get away with an HD5770 and a Voodoo 3 quite well, but when I want to force a game to use one or the other, I need to set it as my primary display.

hyoenmadan wrote on 2023-06-19, 15:35:

"DirectX 5" is mostly DirectDraw games. ... you can run it through some of those wined3d DirectDraw wrappers

https://www.nongnu.org/wined3d/
https://fdossena.com/?p=wined3d/index.frag
http://dege.freeweb.hu/
https://github.com/CnCNet/cnc-ddraw
https://github.com/elishacloud/dxwrapper
https://sol.gfxile.net/ddhack/index.html

At lest one of those is guarantied to make any directdraw game work perfectly on modern system running Win10/11.

dgvoodoo 2 also supports direct draw. But so does XP for the most part.

gnn wrote on 2023-06-19, 16:13:

How the hell did you burn a card on direct draw? I can understand not working right, but burning it is puzzling, unless your cooling or OC was not to par.

That card was not OCed, but it was using its default cooler. DirectDraw games, specially the ones using the old 5 and 6 versions, made the card run pretty hot. This only happened with such titles. DirectX 8 D3D and Openg GL games ran the card warm, but never as hot as the old DirectDraw titles.

I never could point what truly caused it. But I read in some old forums Nvidia cards after the 6x00 series had its 2D engine (blitter?) hardware removed, and ran GDI and DirectDraw inside the chip in emulation mode, by using microcode. Probably something these games were doing borked the card emulation, or prevented it from going into its lower power states? Who knows.

I also noticed cards with proper hardware blitter run XP desktop smother than later cards, and the card itself runs cooler. In WinVista and 7 is the inverse. With DWM enabled modern cards run cooler, and the desktop is smooth, while older cards were running always warm and with the fan turned on, as if your were running an actual 3D game.

hyoenmadan wrote on 2023-06-20, 05:17:

That card was not OCed, but it was using its default cooler. DirectDraw games, specially the ones using the old 5 and 6 versions […]
Show full quote

gnn wrote on 2023-06-19, 16:13:

How the hell did you burn a card on direct draw? I can understand not working right, but burning it is puzzling, unless your cooling or OC was not to par.

That card was not OCed, but it was using its default cooler. DirectDraw games, specially the ones using the old 5 and 6 versions, made the card run pretty hot. This only happened with such titles. DirectX 8 D3D and Openg GL games ran the card warm, but never as hot as the old DirectDraw titles.

I never could point what truly caused it. But I read in some old forums Nvidia cards after the 6x00 series had its 2D engine (blitter?) hardware removed, and ran GDI and DirectDraw inside the chip in emulation mode, by using microcode. Probably something these games were doing borked the card emulation, or prevented it from going into its lower power states? Who knows.

I also noticed cards with proper hardware blitter run XP desktop smother than later cards, and the card itself runs cooler. In WinVista and 7 is the inverse. With DWM enabled modern cards run cooler, and the desktop is smooth, while older cards were running always warm and with the fan turned on, as if your were running an actual 3D game.

Personal curiosity, was the case well cooled? like packed with intake and exhaust fans etc. because i noticed that most of the system having peripherals failings are the ones running a hot case lately.

Can you please tell me if I used a real EAX capable SB card on Windows 7 using Creative ALchemy, would I hear any difference in sound compared to Windows XP? It will be real EAX, right? Is this some sort of "unofficial" EAX support for Windows 7?

nuvyi wrote on 2023-06-20, 13:10:

Can you please tell me if I used a real EAX capable SB card on Windows 7 using Creative ALchemy, would I hear any difference in sound compared to Windows XP? It will be real EAX, right? Is this some sort of "unofficial" EAX support for Windows 7?

Alchemy is an official Creative software product. In windows vista and later OS Microsoft restricted low level hardware access in such a way that hardware accelerated EAX was no longer possible. Alchemy ships as a part of the driver package for a lot of creatives post XP era sound cards. Also, creative has always sold non accelerated sound cards that process all EAX effects in software. I am pretty sure that is all alchemy really is.

In addition to alchemy, many games can be modded to work with open ALsoft, which is an open source EAX implementation.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1j7hqIk0Lz … RRVsnGpLCE/edit

iraito wrote on 2023-06-20, 06:01:

Personal curiosity, was the case well cooled? like packed with intake and exhaust fans etc...

It was long time ago, when the nvidia 8x00 was the hot thing... But yeh, that case had intake and exhaust fan. It also had only sata "thin" cables, not ide or floppy ribbons. Like I said, when running standard DirectX 8 and 9 workloads, it was running warm, almost hot. But when running DirectDraw 5 or 6 games it was running definitely hot, with its built in fan running full speed, non stop. Unfortunately, back at time I thought it was normal, so I kept running these old titles on it until I got the card cooked (first screen corruption, later BSoDs and Machine Check (MCE) errors).