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finally built the gaming pc of your dreams and spent the last two months
locked in your room playing all the latest aaa titles
but nostalgia is a hell of a drug and you
reach for one of your favorite games of years gone by thinking well surely with
such a powerful machine mech warrior 4 will run better than ever right wrong
after you dig out an external optical drive to install that christmas gift
from 18 years ago you discover to your horror that it won't load
you used Windows compatibility mode but
nothing happened so what gives
well it turns out that how much computing power your pc has is only part
of the story i mean if you think about it the nintendo 64 has more than enough
power to run the original super mario brothers but that doesn't mean that you
can just plug an s cartridge into it so here's
the deal one common reason older games won't play nicely with modern hardware
is that many of them were written for 32-bit systems you can learn more about
the differences between these and more modern 64-bit systems up here but for
this episode the main thing that you need to know is that most modern pcs use
64-bit cpus and operating systems giving
them support for more than four gigs of memory and the ability to process more
information at once but programs need to be coded to work
with either a 32-bit or 64-bit system
meaning that if you're running a modern 64-bit version of Windows your pc will
actually emulate 32-bit mode for any
programs written for a 32-bit computer
this includes older games sometimes this emulation works without a
hitch but other times games just won't
cooperate for a number of reasons sometimes older games will try to load
additional but incompatible code often in the form of dll files used by older
32-bit versions of Windows a Windows update might break a dependency that a
game relies on or they might not be able to properly
interface with a 64-bit device driver
other games might refuse to launch at all because maybe some of their code is
written for even older 16-bit systems
which 64-bit Windows editions can't emulate at all or due to draconian drm
protections like safe disk that are completely incompatible with modern
versions of Windows and as if that weren't enough you can
also run into issues with the hardware itself particularly your fancy new
quad-core multi-threaded CPU
modern operating systems will usually try to split a given program's workload
over multiple cores as nearly every consumer-grade pc out there i mean not
to mention even phones has at least two
cores in it now this results in tangible efficiency improvements in modern games
that are written with multi-core cpus in mind but
it can wreak havoc on games whose code
just wasn't meant to be split up that way think of it kind of like taking
apart a lego house versus one made of glued together popsicle sticks
but Linus is there any way to get my old games
running or am i up kb lake without a paddle
well there isn't a foolproof way to play
every older title on a modern system but
there are certainly some workarounds 32-bit versions of modern editions of
Windows are still widely available
for some reason and it is certainly possible to dual boot your computer with
both a 32 and a 64-bit os
you can also use a virtual machine if you need to run a really old version of
Windows or fire up dosbox if you've got something that's that old
now if your issues are performance rather than compatibility related due to
the multi-core CPU issues we mentioned before you can try adjusting the CPU
affinity in Windows task manager or a third-party piece of software this will
force your game to run on only one core
and failing that you can actually try switching off all but one core in your
BIOS or UEFI so that Windows will actually treat your CPU as a single core
model furthermore it is amazing how
resourceful the gaming community is by the way especially when it comes to
their beloved retro titles depending on exactly which game you're trying to run
some resourceful folks out there have created guides for dealing with
antiquated drm schemes through registry hacks and even created fixer utilities
that you can use to launch your older games with special instructions that
will make them run more smoothly finally as a last resort actually i'd
recommend you try this in the first place since it can save a lot of hassle
there's a reasonable chance that you'll find a compatible version of that game
that you loved on a reputable digital distributor like steam or more likely
good old games and they usually cost just a few bucks
so there you have it you may yet be able to enjoy your
favorite games from yesteryear if you don't mind getting a little creative
just don't get too creative and migrate your entire digital life to an old
school beige box running Windows me
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