General XP Help - The Sierra Help Pages

General Help with XP

The difficulty you'll have in running an old game will depend on your machine and on the game. To run old games on an XP computer, you need to consider a few things. DOS game expects to have direct access to your machines hardware. Under XP, these games do not have this access, so some things will not work. You will have no audio (except for the PC Speaker) and you might receive an error about no CD found or have display problems, such as no VESA 2 modes.

To make things worse, you might encounter other problems from the NT environment (like the NTFS file system) and the way XP handles some things (such as long file names) in addition to memory errors.

Before trying anything else, if there is a Windows version of the game, try running that version, trying various Compatibility Mode settings.

To set an environment For DOS programs, XP replaces autoexec.bat and config.sys with config.nt and autoexec.nt (located in the c:\WINDOWS\system32 directory.) These files are well-commented. If you decide to experiment with these files, edit copies of these two files (not the originals) and set your shortcut to point to the copies. This way you not only preserve your originals, but you can also have configuration different files for different programs. These files are well-commented. If you decide to experiment with these files, edit copies of these two files (not the originals) and set your shortcut to point to the copies. This way you not only preserve your originals, but you can also have configuration different files for different programs.

Vlad Romascanu's VDMSound, provides SoundBlaster emulation for DOS programs (which works with any Windows-supported sound card.) Not only does VDMS give you back your sound, but VDMS makes configuring XP's DOS emulation fairly easy.

How can you get around these Problems? If you arm yourself with some knowledge and a few tools, you stand a good chance of getting most of your games working.

A Good Tool Kit:

DOSBox - A DOS computer emulator for many platforms
Third Party Game Interpreters - New interpreters designed for modern machines and Operating Systems
Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit - MS program that lets you tweak a game's Compatibility settings
Slowdown utilities - (Of limited use on modern computers) May help with speed related problems of old games on faster machines
Sierra Setup Utility - For some Sierra games that run the install program in a "hidden window"

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