What games are you having trouble with?

i thought i had star trek genration working, but i set to windows 98 and windows me in compatabillty .when i was installing it failed to install the direct x but was able to run game but grashes when i transport to station .
this due to the driver x3.oa drivers for the game

Did you try Win95 compatability mode instead of Win98/ME compatability mode?

yep ive tryed them all still says failed to install direct x .but nomaly games have the direct x or whatever in d drive of the location for u install but couldt find any direct x for me to install after installing the game in the d directory of the game
.stupid microsoft why couldnt they leave things alone instead of up dating to xp .they must of relised that theres people who like to play old rectro games

Windows XP comes with DirectX 8, and Service Pack 2 comes with DirectX 9. Earlier version of DirectX will not install over later versions, for reasons that should be obvious even to you. Why couldn't Microsoft leave things alone? How about these fine reasons: daily bluescreens caused by improper userspace isolation; memory leaks and other terrible memory management; static system resource size; 512MB virtual memory size limit; ineffective use of physical memory above 512MB; 2GB filesize limit; no Unicode support; bad hardware resource management; terrible USB support; no limited user accounts; retarded default user file locations? Those are just things I can think of off the top of my head. VirtualPC or VMware will allow you to run Windows 95 -- or any other OS -- under Windows XP.

i dont mean to be rude about this.but how many old computers are u ment have to run these old games it be impossable for to have hundred of them let alone to have two in the house plus it take to much room up. and clutter

yes i tryed under windows 95...even stll microsoft made dircts x or 9 whatever u must realise what im trying to get at these chages i understand what your saying to me.

Ace

Yes, I've only ever had to do this once. I succesfully used VMWare (I think it was a trial 30 day version or something) to run an obscure budget game called "My friend Koo" It worked perfectly, with perfect sound. Guest OS was win98-SE. Host OS was WinXP. I think I needed a computer 3 times faster that the recommended spec to run the game smoothly. Even under virtualization, things can run slow, because as we know x86 does not (as of yet) support complete virtualization natively, so certain tricks have to be used. I believe this is being addressed in future incarnations of x86_64/EM64T though.

The game I had would not run under any known compibility fix, I'm sure there are quite a few more awkward ones out there.

Virtualisation is going to get worse, not better, because 16-bit real mode cannot be accessed from 64-bit Windows. Faster processors and more registers will help mitigate needing to emulate 16-bit calls.

Yes, that's certainly true of 16-bit apps. The improvements will only apply to 32/64 bit code.

Virtualisation is going to get worse,

Your post made me realise, Snover, I'm using American English all the time now, even though I'm English, and still living in England.
I just seem to fall back to American English naturally now, when I'm posting on forums such as this. Hehe, I just can't stop myself from using those 'z' characters when I really mean to use 's'.
I guess I've used American software so much nowadays ( I work in I.T.). I tend to use their spellings without even thinking. I suppose this may well be the way all future communication will be like on the web, in "World English" eventually. I suppose time will only tell.

It's okay, I like to throw those Britsh u's in "colour" and "neighbour" sometimes even though I'm American. I think it makes me sound more sophisticated, but it probably just makes me sound like a dork.

Ironic, benkid77, since the only time I've ever been to England was on layover to Bordeaux 😁

Snover: So I guess you like to sound like a dork too, eh? (<-- see, I can do Canadian too*)

* - not really. Canadians actually use "eh" differently than Americans do, but how I know that is a long story.