Older games on Windows 7 vs Windows 8?

The Game Room
1

Ok, I have XP Pro, but support for XP will supposedly end in March. I guess I need to upgrade my OS. I’ve heard good things about Windows 7, and not so good things about Windows 8 (but it’s new and I’m sure bugs or kinks will get worked out). I mainly use my computer for internets and games, and I play a lot of older games. Nothing really old like DOS games, but stuff from the early 2000’s (around the Windows 98/Millenium era).

What are people’s experience playing older games on Windows 7 and Windows 8? Some examples would be Evil Genius, Titan Quest, the Might & Magic series (I have a collection on cd that has been updated and works well with XP).

Also interested in hearing what the learning curve is with each OS from XP.

2

I’m on Windows 7; Evil Genius and Titan Quest work fine. I’ve a bunch of older games from Good Old Games aka GOG; they use Dosbox and almost always work fine without tweaking.

Going from XP to 7 wasn’t too hard. The most irritating thing I recall was having to figure out how to make the drop down icon bar on the top of the screen lower its priority so it didn’t keep dropping down during games like Fallout III.

3

Practically every Win95+ game I’ve tried on Win7 has worked fine once the compatibility mode was enabled. A few times the installer itself caused problems, I had to manually install those, but the games themselves functioned fine. I had some problems with the older Blizzard games where the colors display incorrectly, but there are workarounds to be found online.

The worst trouble I’ve ever had was with Myst, don’t know why but it didn’t like my version of Quicktime. I ended up just installing Win 3.1 on DOSBox and installing the correct version of Quicktime on that and it works fine.

4

Get Windows 7 instead of Win8. And get it soon, since it’s becoming harder and harder to find it in stores.

5

Ok I was kind of leaning towards 7 to begin with, and the responses here are indicating that’s the way to go. One more question, Home premium version does not have “Windows XP” mode according to the specs, but Pro version does.
Is the XP mode what you guys are referring to by “compatibility mode”?

6

I bought Windows 8 because I wanted a boxed copy of Windows and it was only $40 for the upgrade. But it absolutely would not work with my NVIDIA card, though it did work with my crummy integrated graphics. Much of 8 is the same as 7, and I found the new interface to be not that useful and only somewhat interesting.

So I don’t recommend 8, though you may find it worthwhile to grab an upgrade license while you can get the discount and hold onto it until they hash the issues out. It’s $40 through the end of the month.

7

Don’t quote me on this, but I think that XP Mode is just a free copy of XP on a virtual machine for running stuff that doesn’t work in compatibility mode. Virtual PC isn’t suitable for gaming though, I don’t think it has 3D support and the like.

8

This is a notorious problem with Myst and, I think, Riven as well. They only want to use the version of Quicktime the game ships with!

Compatibility mode is something you can apply to the .exe itself.

and
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/316-compatibility-mode.html

The really nice thing about 7 over 8 is that it’s been around long enough that the chances of getting Google to return something useful when you search “win7 + some game” is likely better.

9

I vastly prefer windows 8 to windows 7. In fact I just went and installed 8 on one of my other computers the other day. But I am in a small minority. 7 is a great operating system though and you’ll really like it compared to XP. Keep in mind that the problems people have with 8 are not so much bugs, glitches, slowdown, etc, but just personal preferences having to do with the UI of the operating system. In my experience, 8 boots up extremely fast and runs reliably well.

As far as game compatibility is concerned, I have no idea why a game would run on 7 and not 8. They are practically the same build of windows at their core.

10

I found a Windows Upgrade Advisor that will check your computer to see if it can run Windows 7, and it will run fine on my machine (which is 5 years old, but was pretty powerful when I built it), however my machine will not run XP mode. It says my PC will not support hardware assisted vitualization technology. I tried following the links it gave me to see what hardware or software upgrade I would have to do to run XP mode, but it was a “developer/tech geek” jargonese page and I gave up.

But it sounds like from what people here and some of my offline friends were saying, that compatibility mode is something you apply to programs as you run them, and doesn’t have anything to do with XP mode. And I am encouraged by those saying how well compatibility mode runs their older games.

So I ordered Windows 7 pro (and a bigger hard drive since I came close to running out of space on my 160gb). Thanks to everyone who responded, your replies were very helpful!

11

No you don’t. Until there’s something you need to run that won’t, don’t fix what’s not broken.

12

The only difference I can think of is that Windows 8 lets you run games in lower color modes without changing the entire desktop. So if you have games that require 16-bit color or 256 color modes, you’re better off running Windows 8. Otherwise, the main differences have nothing to do with why you are looking to upgrade. (A big one is that Windows 8 is still cheaper).

And, despite the naysayers here, Windows 8 is currently outselling what Windows 7 sold at this time in its release cycle. Now, maybe that will change now that the cost has went up to $69.99, but we’ll see.

And while I don’t recommend upgrading just because you’re losing support, I do think you’ll like Windows 7, since you have the hardware to run it. And you can get Windows XP mode if you need it. But you didn’t say if you got the 32-bit or 64-bit version. The former generally doesn’t need Windows XP mode, and uses half the memory. The downside is that it can only use a little less than 4 GB of memory, and won’t be quite as fast. And if your board supports EFI, it will boot much faster in 64-bit mode, too. (I think. That may be a Windows 8 only feature.)

Hopefully you do realize that you will not be able to keep any of your apps or settings. And you’ll need to make sure you can get the Windows 7 drivers for your hardware. (Since you got it only 5 years ago, check the manufacturer’s website. They’ll probably have them.) Installing a new OS can be a bit tricky, though it isn’t too bad. I’ll give you a couple pointers.

My first advice is to install Windows 7 on the new drive, leaving XP on the old one. Due to reported problems with not installing Windows 7 on the first disk, I recommend taking the entire Windows XP drive out of the system. You aren’t planning on dual booting, you won’t have to worry about jumpers, and if you need to temporarily get back to XP before the install is complete, you can swap the drives back out. There’s no need to close the computer back up until the install is complete, anyway. And you can have the drivers on a USB flash drive, ready to go.

The second piece of advice is for when you are ready to plug the XP drive back in. If you plan on using it as an external drive, buy one of those USB enclosures and don’t worry about it. (Make sure you get the right one, though. Check the plugs to make sure they will fit. SATA plugs are much smaller than ATA plugs.) Plug it in as soon as Windows 7 is fully loaded. But if you want to use it as an internal drive, make ABSOLUTELY sure that the jumper is not set to the “Master” or “Primary” position. That can really screw things up, ruing all your precious files that you’ll want to copy over.

If you don’t feel comfortable with this, get someone who does to help. On the other hand, if I’m telling you stuff you already knew, I’m sorry. I’m just being thorough.

13

I did take the xp drive out and start fresh with the new drive. Or tried to anyway. I’m getting a message about drivers for dvd/cd, which turns out to be a problem with corrupted files on the disk. You can configure a usb drive to install it, but I’m not sure my motherboard (ASUS P5Q-PRO) supports booting from mem sticks so I’ll have to check it. If not I’ll have to download the iso and burn that to a dvd.

As for reasons for upgrading, theres lots of little ones but no real big ones. I’d like to have support and updates, the networking support will be much easier to work with, theres a few games (like x-com) that I can’t play on xp. More games will go the 7 or above route so I’m going to have to upgrade sooner or later. And I want to see how it looks and check out the new features, of course.

14

Did you get this sorted out? Sorry I didn’t see this.

I haven’t seen a motherboard in years that won’t boot from a USB drive, but you may have to specifically tell the computer to boot from USB. Some computers treat it as an additional hard drive, others have a “Removable Drives” option. Most will let you press a button at boot time to pick which drive, but some will make you go into the BIOS and change it.

But, honestly, the error you are getting is unusual. I’m not entirely sure I understand what you are saying. Can you be less brief, and tell me exactly what happened? I mean, I guess you could have a corrupted driver or a corrupted install disk, but it should be easy to just put the old drive back int, boot up Windows XP and go back redownload those. No need to worry about not having booted correctly

And, since you already pulled out the XP drive, you have to be booting from either the DVD or USB. So that shouldn’t be an issue at all. Your drivers are not used to boot.