The gaslighting by the games industry is real, I felt like having a play through of Rome Total War recently and the remastered edition is completely bugged and unplayable and I mean you really can't even click on buttons after awhile because the third party studio they contracted to mess with the original fucked it up so badly. I'm not even sure if I try playing Baldur's Gate I want to experience the crappy 'enhanced' edition and I'd rather play it in it's original form. It's kind of remarkable how none of the reviews are mentioning how broken some of these releases are.
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (34)
sorted by:
Even if you get originals, you run into the problem of OS compatibility. Not every old game runs well on Windows 10/11, especially stuff that came out when Windows98 is what everyone ran at home.
Regarding the original Baldur's Gate on CD, has anyone had a notion to set up some sort of peer to peer thing where people can ask the group who has original install media for a title, and those with a copy in their possession can respond?
I still have CD binders full of old original install media, and have optical media drives I can burn copies with.
Virtual machines are becoming a necessity for retro gaming.
Oh hey, I didn't think about that. You're right, modern hardware is certainly powerful enough to run older operating systems in a VM and run an older game. Hmmmm. I'll have to think about that, and see if I can devise a way to create older OS ISO images that are patched up as much as they can be.
It's already been done somewhere and there must be guides for it.
That's how fucking bugged some of these remasters are though, it's easier to get the originals working on them than these shitty butchered versions. I mean, I'm still annoyed at the audio bug in Halo MCC.
I have Halo 1 and 2 on CD. Baldur's Gate, too. :p
There's certainly a cutoff period for this. Post-DOS and pre-Windows XP. I can't remember, but I think a lot of it occurred with games that relied on DirectX versions that came out before DX9.
XP broke a lot of DOS games because it wasn't based on DOS the way Win95, Win98, WinME were.
Then later on Win7 broke some XP games because MS went hard and heavy on restructuring device driver APIs for power management and security reasons based on XP being the massive success it was, and those two things becoming much more important than they were when XP came out.
DosboxX or PCEmu will often play stuff that requires Win98 or before.
For things that run on XP, I would recommend VMWare ESXi with your graphics card running through PCI passthrough. It doesn't handle 100% of all games (I've seen one or two that detect that combo as "cheating"), but it handles a lot.
My primary gaming rig runs ESXi with a bunch of VMs set up with various operatiing systems, and my graphics card is just old enough that I can find an old XP NVIDIA driver for a different card of the same architecture that works with it.