Old Game Says I don't Have HD Room When I Do.

Factual Questions
1

I recently acquired Fallout and am having a little bit of trouble running it on my computer. The problem is that when I try to run the game it says that I need 20 MBs of free disk space (I have over 15 gigs). I have been able to get the game to run a few times but I haven’t figured out why it worked these few times. I am running WinXP on a 2.20 ghz intel celeron Gateway laptop. Any ideas?

2

Have you tried running the Compatibility Wizard? I had an old game that wouldn’t run on my XPs with some odd (and incorrect) error message, and running the compatibility wizard fixed it.
If you right click on the icon for the program, and go to Properties, the last tab should be Compatibility. You can adjust the settings accordingly.

Hope this helps.

3
      • Lots of older games won’t run if you have more than 512 megs of RAM, and they can toss any error. One free compatability program I know of is called Resplendent Resolver. It is similar to the Compatability Mode in XP but it allows feeding specific parameters to legacy programs during startup. You install the program and then run RR to create a special shortcut and start the other program with that:
        hXXp://www.resplendence.com/resolver
        If that fails, then look for old-game forums and search/ask there.
        ~
4

We have a winner! Thanks a bunch.

5

No Mutants Allowed is a good resource for everything Fallout, and you might want to check out the troubleshooting FAQ in their tech forum.

6

The older programs probably used variables to hold disk sizes that never expected to see values greater than 4GB (which back in the day was inconceivable).

As a result the disk size gets truncated. The truncation may or may not leave a value that was less than 20 MBs. You say it worked sometimes; that’s probably when the remainder was greater than 20MB. Maybe later you installed something else; the new remainder was now less than 20 MB, so the game was fooled.

I have an old graphics package that has the same problem. Compatibility mode (as was suggested by others) solves the problem.

7

Yep, what BwanaBob said.

It works like an old car that has an odometer that only has six places (plus a decimal). After you reach 999,999.9 and keep going a bit farther it rolls over to 000000.0

It happens on Macs with some old programs, too. (I think FileMaker 4 often has problems with large drives).

The computer allocates a finite number of bits to track how much storage space is on your hard disk and the equivalent of rolling over to 000000.0 is going to be a number such as 34 359 738 368 bits (4 gigabytes, if I did my math right) which, since it thinks in binary, it sees as a nice round number starting with 1 followed by a lots of zeros… and it doesn’t have the allocated bits to store that number (one too many places) so it sees it as zero.

In some cases / some programs, you can fix this by adding a file to the hard drive (e.g., duplicating a 250 MB file or something like that): depending on how it’s set up to do its math, it may poll the system for empty space and get back a number that is now below the threshold for rolling over to zero. “Oh, you don’t have a remaining capacity of 0.03 KB, you’ve got a remaining capacity of 3.98 gigs”.