PC vs Consoles
- Thread starter Death_Emperor_X
- Start date
Slayer_X64
Siegfried SA Moderator
well the old games i am mainly talking about are those made essentially in the time period between the end of the DOS era, and the end of the windows XP era(beginning of the windows Vista era)
it is because of such problems, that for example, i have been forced to write a compatibility guide for my favorite game, Diablo1, which you may find here:
http://www.lurkerlounge.com/forums/thread-13200.html
of course i dont expect you to read all of that. in short, diablo has run into issues with newer windows operating systems involving Color Artifacting, CD's not being recognised, Online play not working(or at least not properly) LAN play not working without an IPX-UDP wrapper(because IPX is a dead protocol nowdays - dead as in not even supported by windows anymore), Fixes to crashes that happen when the game is run over multiple cores(multi-core PC's didnt exist back when diablo was made, so it experiences instability unless limited to 1 core) and also the game now(as of windows 8) is subject to extreme driver issues involving directx, which can actually cause the game to not start up, or not start up properly(the only fix to which is either to run the game in a very hacky fashion, or to essentially run the game over and over until it DOES work.) other minor issues involve the game's volume controls not functioning 100% properly(but these can be adjusted from the desktop anyways...) also due to the recent shifts in resolution, i do fear that diablo's native resolution(640x480) will eventually be phased out. certainly there are mods compatible with the original game to get it running at higher resolutions, but those are glitchy at best, and tend to crash alot. also there is the issue of operating system permissions which can prevent you from doing things such as saving your progress in singleplayer, creating multiplayer save files in multiplayer. and firewall issues can result in blocking diablo from even playing multiplayer to begin with(though these are very easy to fix, its still a problem.)
i suppose you could consider aspect ratio issues to be another compatibility problem, but i'll actually attribute that to personal preference and configuration. some people like proper aspect ratio, others just want the game to fill their whole screen.
but in anycase while i may have specialized in this game's compatibility, that does not mean that there are not other games out there that require some sort of fixes/hacks in order to run properly on newer operating systems. and most of these games, unlike diablo here, never actually get the support you need.
of course you could just say "well why not just run the game in a virtual machine?" but the problem with that is a) directX/direct3D support in virtual machines are still lacking, and virtual machines are also unable to adjust/scale up to the hosts resolution, which in the case of diablo for example, forces you to play the game in either a little tiny window, or a fullscreen window of X resolution, of which displays a massive black box on all sides of the game admist a tiny little play area, which can be very hard on the eyes to read text, not to mention just flat out unappealing.
if you would like, i can even go as far as to post pictures and videos of what diablo looks like with all the compatibility settings on, and of what happens when diablo is just run raw with no fixes on a modern windows OS.
of course while there isnt really much difference between vista and windows 7 compatibility issues(mostly just aesthetic, with a few stability issues), windows 8 suffers from some of the same, and some newer issues(issues which are arguably more severe, because they effect the ability to even start up the game.)
and then there are even more issues with Diablo: Hellfire - the expansion. amongst the new problems are also inability to patch the game by standard means, because while Hellfire is a 32-bit game, the patch itself is a 16-bit application, and thus completely incompatible with 64-bit operating systems. however, because it is a 16-bit application that is written for windows, and not DOS, you cant even run the patch in DOSBOX. the only way to patch the game is through complex setup in a virtual machine that accesses host machine folders, or better yet, to download a "re-written" fanmade patch which provides the same exact fixes as the old patch. though depending on how things go - that can actually end up being quite a hassle as well.
and there are many other issues with old 16-bit windows programs as well.
But lets just end this off by saying there's a huge compatibility gap that is left unfilled between the DOS era, and the 64bit windows era.
