OLD GAMES ON XP?

Has anyone ever played any of the older Adventure games (ie 1994 thru 1997) & had NO glitches? I am finding some intriguing ones in the Reviews section ("The Arrival" 1997
comes to mind). Have checked Inferno's XP List & played some of those, but there are so many more out there. Any suggestions from fellow XPer's? Thanks for any leads!
Geronimo

Thanks for the info Geronimo.

Must give some of my old games a whirl or two

Bernie

Games old & new that I simply installed and played on WinXP without any special settings, tweaks, programs etc include ~

Amerzone, Discworld Noir (plays fine aside from loading quirks), Broken Sword 1, Curse of Monkey Island (MI3), Escape from Monkey Island (MI4), original release Myst, original release Riven, original release Exile, Riddle of the Sphinx (did have one problem in Gil's tent but nothing I couldnt get past), Mystery of the Nautilus, Return to Zork, all Nancy Drew titles, Infocom text adventures, Tony Tough & the Night of the Roasted Moths, Uru, Syberia, Syberia 2, Omega Stone, Schizm aka Mysterious Journey, Putt-Putt titles, Freddy Fish titles, Pajama Sam titles, Spy Fox titles, Mysterious Journey 2

The Arthur's Knights demo ran okay on winXp so that's another one!


Games that played okay on WinXP for me (without emulators or tweaks) but had major sound problems~

Eric the Unready, Freddy Pharkas, Secret of Monkey Island (MI1), Monkey Island 2:LeChuck's Revenge, Maniac Mansion, Discworld 1, Discworld 2


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
More games worked on winXP by using the compatability tab under properties which you can get to by right-clicking the game's icon
(ie realMyst) &/or Inferno's helpful suggestions.


& some barely ran at all ~ even basic gameplay greatly benefitted from helpful programs like ScummV & DosBox (ie Simon the Sorcerer 1 & 2). (These often fix the sound problems too!)

Other old(er) games we played on our cranky 98se machine or zee elderly Frankenstein ~ so we havent tried them on the newer machines as yet.

Hope thats helpful to you

Susan

Susan,
Thank you so much for the good info. will look into some of these.
Geronimo

I read your comment on The Arrival, so I thought I might give you some good news, I runs great under Win XP. I played it myself a year ago.


If you would like to know how I will be glad to help.

Cheers

Lagavulin,
Yes, I would be very interested to know how you got it to work.
Geronimo

I played "morpheus" on XP with no problem except my cursor movement was a little woodgy. But I got used to it.

WW

Gabriel Knight 2 plays Ok too except for some sound problems.

I just tried the first Crystal Key on winXp and it did fine.

Starship Titanic also ran fine on winXP this afternoon (This thread reminded me I promised to check both programs. Couldnt remember if I checked it before

Just in case anyone is interested and this concerns anyone, I'm going to post here. I have WordPerfect11 on my new Dell. My new Dell has Hyper-threading. WordPerfect11 will not load gifs and jpgs properly. Seems that the hyper-threading needs to be disabled in the BIOS.

If you are trying to run a game and the graphics are messing up, it is possible that this is the problem. Just a "heads up" in case

So nice for the feedback guys. Have played those games & they were great, but what about "Comer", "Genesys", or "Jerusalem"? All older games, but I am looking for them now. Don't know if they will play on my XP, but would like to try them. I am not buying/selling games for profit ..... just want to have fun playing them, then pass along nominally to fellow Boomers. So much for that! I do enjoy hearing from y'all!
Geronimo

Lagavulin,
Many thanks for info you sent to my e-mail!
Geronimo

Your !!!!

Anytime Geronimo

Cheers

Keep in mind that some games run flawlessly on some XP systems, but require tweaking on others. This can be real frustrating if you run into a problem and ask for help and get the response "It should run on XP" or "It ran fine on my XP system."

The fact is, there are so many variables on today's computers (regardless of whether you're running XP or not) that tweaking is inevitable.

But solving the problem of how to get a game running can be an adventure itself!

emily

ps Lasanidine, have you tried running GK2 with VDMSound (assuming you're playing the DOS version) to fix the sound problems? That solved sound problems for me.

Fov,
Nuts!! You just blew away my thoughts of the "all-perfect" XP system. Computers!!.... still takes some smarts to make this stuff behave the way you want it to. I will keep trying! Thanks!
Geronimo

Thanks for saying that, Emily.

I'm looking at Susan's list of games that played with no special handling and there are a few that I couldn't get to run on my XP computer without major tweaking, so decided to play them on the ME computer.

Original Myst would have played if I installed the old quick time, since it installed & played just fine but the videos didn't work. Riven wouldn't even install. I kept getting the old 16 bit application error. I haven't been able to get sound to work on most of the old Sierra games, even with the special dos emulators & vdm sound.

So far, I've gotten everything I tried on the Me computer to work though, so it hasn't been a problem. Admittedly, I haven't worked very hard at getting the XP to run some of the games since I had the other option, but as Emily said, it should be mentioned that whether a game plays on xp without tweaking or not depends on several configurations of hardware & software.

Thanks for the heads up, Burpee. I didn't know that the hyper-threading might affect some games.

Melanie

And in my case, Riven installed and played without a hitch.

It was one of the first games I installed on my new XP system, so I attributed it to beginner's luck...

There is a patch that helps with sound on a lot of old Sierra games, if you are getting an error message that says the game can't initiate your audio driver (or something along those lines). It's called the GoSierra patch and is available in a few places if you search on Google. I've also gotten sound working on some of those games by messing around (a lot) with the Install.exe file... selecting various sound options through trial and error. But in general, it's just easier to play the old Sierra games on my older win98 machine.

-emily

Thanks for the Sierra patch info, Emily. I'll look for it. I don't think I tried that one, but don't remember for sure. I know I tried every sound option with no luck. I finally gave up and played on the older computer.

I was really surprised that Riven wouldn't install on my system since it's newer than Myst and that one installed without a hitch. Strange, huh?

Melanie

Melanie...just in case you didn't know..while installing any Sierra game..if you are asked if you want your computer "tested" say NO! that makes things really worse, don't remember what it does, but sure won't install!! Glynn

comer and jerusalem played just fine on XP. I am not sure but i don't think genesys did but then again i won't do any tweaking other than try compatability mode.

Hi Glynn,

Thanks for the info. Yes, I did read that in one of the posts, but that wasn't my problem. I was able to install without a hitch and even play with no problems but the sound just wouldn't work no matter what I did.

Melanie

Thanks for the heads up on that Sierra patch. Found it. WOW!! That *IS* a find!

~ One location for GoSierra~
http://www.spacequest.net/sq3/patches/


~ Sierra Games on WinXP ~
http://users.snip.net/~besterp12/


Since I last posted to this thread, My mom asked me to put on her Orient Express 3D Jigsaw and it runs better on the new WinXp system than it did on the old 98se!

On the flip side, we found David Macaulay's "The New Way Things Work" superb edutainment title wouldnt run at all

Thanks for that second link, Susan!

A few things I've gleaned that are contradictory to what that page says --

Selecting 640x480 resolution in compatibility mode doesn't work for all the Sierra games, because when you launch it, the game "looks" for the resolution before compatibility mode has a chance to kick in. This is true for KQ5, among others. For those games, you have to select 640x480 manually in the display properties (which takes a little fiddling, because XP makes it *look* like you don't have that option...)

Also, virtually everyone who tries to run GK1 in Windows has problems with the game crashing when you try to save. That page makes it sound like it runs fine (another instance of "it worked for me!") but in most cases, there are severe problems that require quite a bit of tweaking. I gave up and played it on Win98 instead.

-emily

Further to old games that work on XP Home.
"Kyrandia, Hand of Fate" installed and runs without any tweaking etc. Just loaded it and works brilliantly.....Decided to give it a play before it wends its way to Goldnorchid on Tuesday morning. Didn't even have to go to DOS to play it, just clicked on the Shortcut Icon on the Desktop. Not bad for an old 1995 game.
And concur that "Comer" runs without any tweaking, it did on my Machine anyway.
"Walter"
Who's had a really Dull and overcast day, But, 7:15 in the evening now and the sky has cleared and the Sun is putting on a brave show.