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I'm in Waterloo at the moment, and next available to work in September 2008.

Windows 98 Compatibility

December 26th, 2004

So my little brother got a classic Carmen Sandiego game for Christmas, which I was helping get started with today.

I was frustrated that, as with many Win3.1 games, you’re required to drop your display to 256 colours to play at all, and 640×480 resolution, to make the game run full-screen.

Windows XP introduced a tool called the Compatibility Wizard, which allows you to have it automatically make the necessary changes before running particular applications, and then reverse them again directly afterwards. Unfortunately, my parents’ computer is a Win98 holdout. All the pages I’ve been able to find helpfully suggest changing the resolution and color depth before run… this is fine for me, but a low-attention-span younger sibling would not tolerate such a workaround.

Is there some application out there that handles the switch for you, or has the death knell sounded on Windows 98 for this computer?

Also, I remembered playing a version of Sandiego (a long time ago) that had sidescrolling cityscapes where you could talk to and interact with different characters. Since all of them have pretty much the same name, I don’t remember at all what it was, and a quick peek around the Underdogs site didn’t reveal it. Anyone with an idea about which one this is, please drop me a line.

Mike

← Earlier Later → Posted at 11:16 pm to Uncategorized.

Discussion

I did not know that it was even possible to run Win 3.1 programs in Win Xp. It is sad to say this, but I don’t this kind of backward compatibility is in the best interest for Microsoft or Windows. To have this backward compatibility makes the operating system bulky, big, ugly, and inefficient. It is great for sentimental reasons to be able to play old games and recapture some good memories of the past. To play such games I am more for the approach of making a “Win98 emulator” or “Win 3.1 emulator” that would run as a program on top of XP instead of having it inside XP. But that will never happen….

Posted at 4:02 pm on December 31st by Jon Berg.
Actually, VDMSound does an extraordinarily good job of emulating Soundblasters and wierd graphical configurations for XP and 2000, but no such solution exists for my brother on Win98.

Posted at 4:02 pm on December 31st by Mike.
To be honest, that’s what VMWare is for; Microsoft does realize that having massive backwards-compatibility just makes things slow and chuggy.

Why not install VMWare (or, for that matter, MS Virtual PC, since Waterloo gives it to us for free as part of the MSDN-AA?) I know it takes up a lot of disk space, but sometimes that’s the best idea for running these old programs. That, and it’s pretty amusing in class when you fire up the big Windows 3.1 splash screen on your brand-new notebook PC…

-Alex
2A Comp Eng.

Posted at 11:50 am on July 14th by Alex.
I’ve recently also discovered DOSBox, which is pretty much perfect emulation for anything < 1992. For example, I can run the Fate of Atlantis Talkie on it perfectly, but Full Throttle is awful choppy.

The only ‘perfect’ solution is to just keep an old P120 lying around. This is an interesting blog about compatibility in Windows.

Posted at 3:49 pm on July 14th by Mike Purvis.

You can use Markdown for style. I love hearing from readers, but please don’t hijack the discussion, use offensive language, or try to sell anything.

Windows 98 Compatibility

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