I have a game that won’t install on win2k because it wants xp or vista only. Internally XP and 2K are almost identical and I suspect the game would probably run fine on 2k, but that they don’t want the support hassle in case it doesn’t, so they just don’t allow 2k installation.
You can activate a win2k compatability mode that’ll tell the program that it’s being run on windows 95, 98, or NT4 … is there some way to spoof it so that it thinks it’s running on XP?
Gonna give one bump a try. Is that allowed? Been a week.
I don’t know for sure but I doubt it. Backwards compatibility is sketchy as it is. I don’t think that M$ would make anything forward compatible. There may be a shareware program that does it, but why? No real demand.
So it gives an error message when you try to install it? and what game is this?
Company of heroes. “This game is for windows XP and vista only” or something is the message, and it quits.
I suspect that if it thought it was on XP, and installed, it would work fine without problem. They just deny it at the install point.
I don’t think you’ll be able to spoof it because the game is probably making an operating system call to ask it the version and you don’t have control over that (for what it’s worth, win2k identifies itself as NT 5.0 and XP identifies itself as NT 5.1).
Some programs have install switches that you can manually activate to bypass the OS check, but you may have to run the installer from a command line to get it to take the switch. If nothing else, open up a command window and type install (or whatever the install program is called) followed by a “/?” without the quotes and see if it gives you any options.
Win2k was shipped with an earlier version of DirectX than XP, and there are a few minor things that microsoft broke between 2k and XP, but I’m surprised that a game demands XP.
Good guess, I didn’t think about that. It’s an MSI installer file, and while running the installer /? does bring up options, there’s nothing that affects this.
Other games (BF2, for one, probably others) will give you a warning on win2k that it’s unsupported on anything but XP, but it runs fine (well, as fine as any DICE made software runs). I suspect CoH performs a similar check, but rather than just a warning, blocks it.
I think, when you activate win2k compatability layers (for 95, 98, NT5) that the OS will identify as that OS - that’s why I thought that perhaps there was some way to get it to identify as XP, even if it was a third party trick.