What's the best way to get old PC games running on newer

It varies case by case. Just search for the name of the game plus the name of your OS.

>>3478228
That's like asking what's the best way to poke yourself in the eye. Dosbox is probably the easiest for most games. For a few others a VM works better. None work anywhere close to as good as a free machine dug out of the dumpster.
Never tried The Dark Eye on dosbox but the first two google results for the dark eye dosbox explain how people have done it. You didn't give your definition of "newer tech" though so maybe you're trying to do it on a smart watch or something retarded.
Phantasmagoria is a classic.

There's no easy way at the moment. I remember looking forward to building a virtual machine with windows 3.1 and 95, but it turns out that they don't emulate a lot of the hardware used for games.

DOSbox is good but you'll probably be messing about with a lot of frustrating text files.

An ideal solution would be to emulate old windows, so that you get to see the file icons and stuff, as it was experienced. But the software isn't there yet so I ended up focusing on consoles instead. Hopefully someday they'll be a retroarch for PC games.

It's my problem as well. There are a lot of windows 95 games that I want to play, especially adventure games that won't run on new systems and can't run in Dosbox. The Virtual Machine thing seems needlessly complicated and from what I've heard not all that reliable when you do get it set up.

As someone who invested the time and $10 to get and set up a retro PC with 98se compatible hardware it amuses the shit out of me when PCfags realize that one thing you can't emulate is mid to late 90s PC games.

>>3478652
dgvoodoo2 is getting there since it emulates older directx versions.

>>3478576
VM's aren't complicated at all and reliable. Maybe you're confusing the VM with the old versions of windows. Those are indeed complicated and unreliable.
When you say "new systems" you actually mean "new operating systems". I wonder how many of those games would actually work on a new hardware system running an older operating system? Or on dosbox if you learned how to get windows running in it?

>google adventure legends world
>go to the forum
>go to the support section
>go to the stickied topic "ready to use VM's"

Shivers and Shivers 2 are fun old games. Obduction is a weird sci-fi game that is mildly spooky.

>>3478890
Oh yeah Gadget is really spooky, it's like Dark Eye in that it's more an interactive story than a game. Easily the spookier than Dark Eye.

Rank the following OS in compatibility with old (1997-2002) windows games:

Win2K
WinXP
Vista
Win7
Win8
Win10

Also, how well does WINE run old (1997-2002) windows games in Linux?

>>3478957
And If I decided to install Win98SE for my gaming computer, what is the year that Windows games were no longer able to run on 98SE?

>>3478228
The Dark Eye won't work with DOSBox directly because it's a Windows 3.1 game.

But you can install and run Win 3.1 in DOSBox, and then run The Dark Eye inside it.

>>3478880
Maybe it's just complicated for me then. I saw some tutourials on how to set it up, and it's gone way over my head. I'd probably work better with a youtube tutorial which I might look into one day. Not sure how much resources does the VM hog from you and is it a pain having it installed with the rest of your "normal" stuff on it or not.

>>3478963
>>3478880
You can't just install old operating systems on new hardware because there aren't any drivers. Even my retro computer from 2002 required me to do some serious searching to find 98 drivers for its entire chipset but it runs everything its compatible with like a raped ape (to quote the guy who taught me about premium PC builds in the late 90s)

>>3478957
It's not easy to rank Vista/7 vs 2000 as either of them has compatible games that the other doesn't. XP is better than all the others though, being better than 2000 specifically because Microsoft added better backwards compatibility to it than 2000 had.

Regardless of OS, DOSBox usually does the trick for old 16-bit stuff while for 32-bit you can load up Olly and take it from there if things go south.

>>3480996
Olly?

>>3480728
Most people prefer video tutorials these days. Give it a try and see if it helps.
95 in a VM will require very little in the way of resources on a modern machine. No body even measures RAM in MB anymore. You can choose not to create a desktop icon if that annoys you. That's about all the pain having a VM installed might give you.

>>3480972
>i had trouble finding 98 drivers for a 2002 machine
Your googlefu is beyond not strong. You are living breathing search engine results repellent.

>>3481040
I don't think you've actually tried getting very old drivers. There's no shortage of websites claiming to have them but 99% of them are spam. The longer a driver has existed the more time sites have had to buy search phrases and automatically set up bait sites.

>>3481051
Yeah, tell me about it.
Search for a driver on google and the first page will be exclusively filled scamsites that want you to download their virus to "fix dll errors".

Is there any site that can be trusted for drivers?
I find myself using Windows update to get drivers but it is unreliable and likes to overwrite good drivers. Also I am concerned about connecting to the Microsoft BOTnet framework.

>>3478880

VM doesn't work, there's literal hardware stuff used for games which they don't bother emulating

>>3478957
It doesn't make sense to use anything after Win7 if you want backwards compatibility.

I have heard complaints/rumors that Vista has worse backwards compatibility than Win7.

XP is better than Win7 for running old games.

Make sure to do a 32bit Windows install. It is able to run old games all the way back to Win3.1 that 64bit Windows cannot open.

>>3480996
>XP is better than all the others though, being better than 2000 specifically because Microsoft added better backwards compatibility to it than 2000 had.

Are you sure about this? Any links?
I like to install Win2K on old Pentium 3-4 PCs because it uses less RAM than WinXP and doesn't need to be activated. But does this mean that my old games compatibility is reduced compared to WinXP?

>>3478228
Virtual Machines
PCem

>>3482084
Driverguide used to be good. When I was setting up the retro pc I found another one that was pretty good but I forget what it was called. Doesn't help that a lot of sites don't work right with 98 compatible browsers not even Opera 9.

>>3478228
For The Dark Eye use a Mac emulator. Many "slideshow" adventure games ran and looked better on a Mac for some reason (had better transitions).

Does anyone have any experience with the the compatibility options in the properties window of the .exe of old games?

"Run this program in compatibility mode for _____"
"Run in 256 colors"
"Run in 640X480 resolution"
"Disable visual themes"
"Disable desktop composition"
"Disable display scaling"

I never use these because they don't work when I try them.
Which of these settings are useful and when? What types of errors can be fixed by them?
Can you give an example of a game that starts working properly when you adjust these settings?
When a game is fullscreen, how much of the Windows operating system is still active to use system resources? For example, is the desktop background still stored in memory?

>>3481001
http://ollydbg.de/
>>3482129
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb457035.aspx

You can probably find a better link if you search, this was one of few in my results that was relevant and not some newer shit about Vista/later. Basically for 2000 as an earlier version of NT they hadn't fleshed out 9x backwards compatibility as much as they did in their next NT release, XP (and Vista came such a long while later demand for 9x at that point was just a fraction of when XP was released and thus not improved, rather scaled back/neglected to make room for 20GB of bloat). Speculating, the fact that XP unlike 2000 was consumer oriented might also have been an incentive for MS for the improved backwards compatibility.

At the end of the day what works works. If you're having a good time with 2000 then keep it. For P3/old boxes in general I might go for 98SE myself.

>>3481051
>i couldn't so you didn't try
project harder sport

>i fell for the driver site scam
topkek. Damn. Your googlefu is worse than I thought.
Instead of searching for drivers you might want to try searching for people who know what they're doing and have already found them.

>>3482925
>topkek. Damn. Your googlefu is worse than I thought.

Can you give us some tips on how to use google well?

What do I do when a modern game shares the same name as a retro game and all search results are for the former?

Is there a way to filter out commercial/scam/social media/normie sites from the results?

>>3482760
>http://ollydbg.de/

Can this program hack the executable of 90s Windows games to make them run on modern systems?

>>3483279
>What do I do when a modern game shares the same name as a retro game and all search results are for the former?

You put in the year of the release. Jesus.

>>3483306
I know this feel.

"Oh hey a Doom speedru- fucking Doom 4."
"Oh hey Tomb Raide- the goddamn shitty reboot."
"Oh hey Devil May Cr- DmC has its own entry, dumbfuck!"
"A Final Fantasy 2 speed run? This I gotta s- THAT'S 4 YOU FUCKING AUTIST!!"

If older game came out on GOG, download this version - there are some exceptions like Daggerfall or Quake.
Games using DirectDraw runs like shit on Win8/8.1/10, while on Win7 runs almost flawlessly. MS just fucked something up.

>>3483627
It's the forced Desktop Windows Composition, family. 'Aero' is effectively forced. I've had okay luck with VMware or using Wine DLLs for weird 9x-ware though.

>>3482084
>>3481051
Slimdrivers Free might work granted you have atleast a internet connection.

>>3482662
A very few games ask to be set in 256 colors so obviously that. I also know for fact that Dungeon Keeper 2 needs "Disable visual themes" checked to work on Win7+

>>3483279
Well first, you just ignore any driver sites that might show up in any results. That would have saved you a lot of time.
Real first, check the manufacturer. At some point in the past it was all the rage for them to make drivers unavailable after a while. Most companies now understand that this is what is called "shit aftersales service" and don't do it. In fact things that disappeared 15 years ago have often returned.
A site called penis-enlagement-pills-drivers-download.com is unlikely to have what you're looking for (in this case). A site like vogons.org is.
Remember. You don't actually have to find the driver, just someone else who already has.