Can hardware be too fast for older games?

Defcon5 · 2 Mar 2006 at 20:33

As title, i installed both of the sudden strikes (my fave game of all time) and neither of them run for some reason.

One says there is no cd in the drive (despite the fact i just installed it from that drive)

The other just crashes to desktop.

There are no stability issues and its a fresh install.

I had a look on google and found some info on having to slow down hardware in order for it to be compatible, is there any truth in this?

paradigm · 2 Mar 2006 at 20:40

are they old DOS (dos4gw) based games?

PinkFloyd · 2 Mar 2006 at 20:44

I'm jumping to the conclusion that you are running in Windows XP.
If it is an older game that is, say for Windows 95, set the game.exe file for win95 combatibility. (rightclick - properties)
That might fix it.

Also look to see if there are any up to date patchs for the games, this is also likely to help.

Defcon5 · 2 Mar 2006 at 20:56

No there windows games, and iv tried chenging the compatibility modes.

They worked fine with xp on my old barton rig, but this one throws a hissy fit

Ill have a check for any patches

triggerthat · 2 Mar 2006 at 20:57

Its not going to be a speed issue but a compatability issue.

Defcon5 · 2 Mar 2006 at 21:00

triggerthat said:
Its not going to be a speed issue but a compatability issue.

But with what though? DVD drives maybe?

emetic · 2 Mar 2006 at 21:45

I had a program that allowed me to run UFO Enemy Unknown. It basically slowed my CPU down to 486 speed allowing UFO to run properly and not at 10000 days per second. I can't remember what it was called by try google for a cplu slow down prog to run old games.

Synergy · 3 Mar 2006 at 09:46

triggerthat said:
Its not going to be a speed issue but a compatability issue.

Wrong

Defcon3 said:
But with what though? DVD drives maybe?

This should never be a problem, the old dos MSCDEX etc would still just treat it as a CD Reader

Plenty of old (OLD) games didn't have any speed checking since the game all of the PCs around were not vastly difference in speed and it made no noticable difference to the gameplay. Also, when PCs finally DID come out that were a fair bit faster they all came fitted with a 'turbo' switch, which would switch your CPU between speeds. Usually 16Mhz for old IBM compatibility, or something faster like 25 or 33 mhz (if you were rich

).

This is what I used to use for all of my old DOS games, http://www.hpaa.com/moslo/ there are a few similar utilities around but I'm afraid this is the only one I can recall at the moment.

Supercow · 3 Mar 2006 at 09:49

Yes they can be, just look at quake 1. People with better PC's can jump and run faster that people with slow pc's

Synergy · 3 Mar 2006 at 10:11

sup3rc0w said:
Yes they can be, just look at quake 1. People with better PC's can jump and run faster that people with slow pc's

Not really the same problem though, this is something like a minor interpolation bug in the code. If the game ran as the OP is saying, we'd all get free speedhacks