I’ve inherited my mom’s old laptop, and a couple of weeks ago I bought the Sims 2 to play on it. After playing for 20 minutes, it froze on me and I had to reboot the computer. Did this several times, went online to see if I could figure out what was going on, and it turns out the laptop’s graphics card isn’t advanced enough, and apparently I’d have to get a whole new motherboard to upgrade. (So I’ve been told by my more computer-savvy brother.) Or at any rate, the upgrade would cost a lot more than the $39 game, and it’s not worth it.
Damn. I just want to create a dynasty and take over Veronaville; is that too much to ask? Apparently, yes.
You should be able to play CIV2 just fine, unless it has some spesific problem. I play lots of old games on XP. Does it work when in Windows 98 compatability mode? (Right-click CIV2, Properties, Compatability)
Right click on the icon that launches Civ 2. It will bring up a menu. The last item on that menu is “Properties.” Select it. This brings up a window with (usually) four tabs at the top. One of these tabs will be called “Compatibility.” Click this tab. This changes the window. In the new window, there’s a box called “Compatibility mode,” with a check box labelled “Run this program in compatibility mode for:” and a drop-down menu with all the previous versions of Windows back to '95. Click the check box. It defaults to Windows 95, which is what you want, so you should be set. Click okay to close the window, then double-click the Civ 2 icon to launch the game. It should work fine in XP for you from now on.
Yeah, sticking it in '98 compatability mode solves that problem for a lot of older games for me. I think it was someone on this board that clued me into it, too.
The browser of your choice should have a menu item that enables you to export your bookmarks to a flat HTML file. Then you can transfer that file to the new computer via whatever arcane method you choose – email it to yourself, or the good old fashioned disk/thumb drive.
In IE, it’s under File | Import and Export. In FF, it’s probably located under the Bookmarks menu somewhere.
www.abandonia.com has lots of abandonware: old games that aren’t sold any more and that the company who owns them are ok with people treating them as freeware; in some cases (ex. old Might and Magic) that company may even offer free downloads from their own webpage or bundle them with new versions.
There’s also many that can be bought and downloaded and others that it is illegal to do so; these last ones have an entry but no possibility to download.
And there’s some software that allows you to play old games that require DOS mode, or simply which do work in DOS; if you’re using DOSBox to play your old games you can speed them up or down, which many times is necessary, otherwise stuff just goes too fast.
Was gonna say, I have an AMD Athlon XP1600+, 768k RAM, BillsucksXP™ Pro. Civ 2 and 3 run fine. Even my old copy of Colonization runs well. It’s Civ 4 that I have trouble with. I need a better graphics card for one (I need a whole new 'puter…) but it is also really flaky. I often IM my sweetie and alt-tab back to Civ 4. This gets very precarious. Also screws with saving games. I VERY often get “corrupted save file” warnings.
Otherwise, your machine will run Civ3 with no problems, other than perhaps the game play is a bit different from Civ2. Go pick up a copy of Civ3:Conquests (only a couple of dollars) and start a thread about it. There are some great mods available for this that you’ll enjoy. Don’t worry, as long as you have a broadband internet connection it’s easily done, and I’ll walk you through it.
Thanks for the moderation Skippy, we were all tormented by the harshness of Bear’s words. Now could you get Bosda to speak in full paragraphs, rather than sentence size bullet points? Thanks again, ever so much.
Huh. I pitched my copy of Civ2 as it was whining at me about needing some codec or other, and that would have cost more beans than the software was worth. Still, I got plenty of mileage out of it, not to mention the time I had two palaces at once.
M: TW isn’t a bad alternative, I’ve found. No tech research but much more interesting battles.
