Kiddie Game Playing in XP: issues and thoughts

[mubs]

My 9-year old has a ton of games that are written to run on Win 3.1 / 95 / 98. She thinks they are games, but sneaky dad is trying to improve her math, language, reasoning, and problem-solving skills.

The OS is Win 98SE. I've used CD-Anywhere ver. 1.0 (from V-Communications - the System Commander folks) to convert CDs to images and to mount and use them. I started with Daemon tools circa 2000, but ran into some problems I don't remember now, so bought a copy of CD-Anywhere. It has worked fairly well.

The games are from companies like Broderbund, Learning Adventure, etc. From what I've seen, code quality is not even on the list of essentials, let alone being a priority. Installing a new game will sometimes break an existing one. I strongly suspect, the OS being win 98, that there is a strong case of "DLL Hell" as well.

A day ago, I pulled out the existing GeForce MX video card and put in a 9600XT and the latest drivers ATI has for W98, and most games now hang/freeze right after starting. A 40% failure rate (games not playing) has jumped to 95%. Since problems skyrocketed, I suspect the driver. Maybe I also need to install DirectX 9.

This is a Dell machine (hand-me-down + upgrade money), and I reinstalled WXP Home in a dual boot confing with the pre-existing W98. I wonder how many of the games will be compatible with WXP. I haven't used WXP this far, but AFAIK, XP does not suffer from the DLL-Hell issue. Whatever games are compatible with XP, I'll re-install on XP. Ultimately the games that will play only on W98 will continue there (W98 and the games both re-installed, obviously).

I plan to use Daemon tools on the WXP side (Ver. 4 is due out in October). I also have a copy of Virtual Drive 7 Deluxe from Farstone. Have never used it, no idea how good or bad it is. Anybody know?

Since I don't want to bugger up the live WXP installation by installing incompatible games, I'd like to install a copy of XP inside a virtual machine and test the game there first.

Just for clarity, I presume the Home and Pro editions of WXP make no difference to game compatibility.

The WXP side of the machine will also serve as wifey's machine (photo editing and such).

Any thoughts, comments, advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

 

[i]

Umm ... try using a little more duct tape and chewing gum?

Sorry! You did say, "any thoughts, comments."

More seriously though ... is there any chance you could just create a whole bunch of partitions and put a plain OS installation on each partition? And then try sticking one or two games on each partition? Presumably if a given game has ever worked at any point if you isolate it so that it's the only game working on the OS, it should work, right?

 

[i]

Any chance you could find an old 2nd hand system somewhere to dedicate to this task? You'd have much more ability to experiment that way. You say that these games were written to run on Win 3.1 / 95 / 98. Surely you could find an older system somewhere that you could use as a dedicated system for this project.

 

[mubs]

I did have an older system that was replaced by this one. I took the Win-98 install from there and ported it over to the new hardware. That was kind of asking for trouble in and of itself.

The W98 portion is intrinsically fragile, and I guess there is little that anyone can do about that; I'm quite resigned to the situation. I'm more interested in the WXP side of things; it should solve at least some problems.

The critical gap in my knowledge is
a) XP Home compatibility with games: guess I'll be finding out about this anyway, so it's more of an interesting situation than a desperate search for the answer
b) Are XP Pro and XP Home any different when it comes to game compatibility. This I surely would like to know from the enlightened souls here.

Thank you for the responses, though.

 

[Mercutio]

As a general rule, XP runs about 85% of the entertainment software that has been made for Windows. Games are usually not the problem, especially since almost no games worth playing were made for Windows prior to the release of DirectX, and XP supports DirectX just fine.
16-bit games are the only unknown quantity. You never can tell with those.

XP Home and Pro are identical for all practical purposes. The only real-world differences certainly don't apply in your scenario, as you aren't dealing with anything related to network connectivity.

 

[mubs]

Thank you, Merc, that helps a lot.

I read some reviews of Virtual Drive 7 on Amazon, and think I will stay away. Apparently good product, but horrible company that cripples it at the slightest chance and zip, zilch, nada response to any inquiry made to them.

 

[Bozo]

XP also has a 'compatability' mode. I've never used it and I don't remember how to invoke it.
Now that I've looked it's on the start>programs> accessories menu.

Maybe that would help.

Bozo :mrgrn:

 

[mubs]

Thanks, Bozo.

 

[Mercutio]

It can also be set on a per-program basis. Look at the properties on any given executable file.