Running Older Games on Windows 7 by Thomas Ward
Many gamers such as myself have recently purchased a new computer in the last year with state-of-the-art hardware, equipped with the new 64-bit processors from Intel and AMD, and a 64-bit version of Windows 7 preinstalled. For the most part this is fine for the majority of computer applications, and computer users, but for some of us who wish to hang onto our older Dos and Windows games it is getting to be quite an issue to maintain backwards compatibility. One of the problems is that the 64-bit versions of Windows 7 will not run any 16-bit applications. As a result many Dos games including Dos based interpreters like Scare, Frotz, and so on are simply incompatible with newer releases of Windows. Sure, there are MS Dos emulators like DosBox, but those aren't screen reader accessible. For text adventures there are other interpreters like Adrift, Winfrotz, Wintads, etc but those are not a perfect solution either. While they run fine on Windows for anyone using a screen reader it requires a fair amount of reviewing the screen with the screen reader's review cursor which drastically slows down game play. Another issue we are being confronted with is backwards compatibility for older Windows technologies. For example, Visual Basic 6--which was developed for Win 98--is now deprecated and officially unsupported on Windows 7. Although, these runtime libraries can be installed, and most Visual Basic apps and games still work nobody knows how long this compatibility will continue to last. It might work on the next five to ten versions of Windows, or be totally incompatible with the next version that is released. We just don't know. This means that we need to find a solution that will help maintain compatibility with our newer systems and platforms for years to come regardless of what we might be running at the time. Believe it or not there is a fairly straight forward solution for these and other compatibility issues. Its called virtual machines. A virtual machine is simply a third-party application such as VMWare Player or VirtualBox that allows the end user to install a guest operating system inside a host operating system. This creates a virtual environment that runs on top of the existing OS/platform allowing the end user to run software and applications in their native environment. For example, I'm running a Toshiba notebook with an AMD 64-bit processor, have 3 GB of ram, 325 GB of hard drive space, and Windows 7 Home Premium installed. That's plenty of power to run Windows 7, but I'm actually now running two operating systems side-by-side on the same machine. I downloaded VMWare Player 4.4 from http://www.vmware.com and installed it. Then, I created a new virtual drive, and installed Windows XP with service pack 3 into that virtual drive. As a result Windows XP is running side-by-side with Windows 7 Home Premium. The advantages here are huge. With Windows XP running virtually ontop of Windows 7 I can now install any games written in Visual Basic, older 32-bit Sapi voices, any Dos games I want, as well as 16-bit interpreters like Frotz, Scare, Tads, etc and run them on a modern PC inside Windows XP. It really is the only surefire solution to bridge the gap between running a fully up to date PC and hanging on to software from yesterday. Another advantage of using a virtual machine is being able to easily back up your installed software and games. VMWare Player installs your guest operating systems and software into an image which can be backed up to an external hard drive. To restore it on a new PC all you have to do is restore the image into a fresh copy of VMWare Player, browse for the image containing your software, and open it. So instead of having to reinstall your older games and applications from scratch you can keep a master image somewhere for new PC installs making backing up and restoring guest operating systems a breeze. For game developers--such as myself--it has the added advantage of being able to write games and other software for multiple target platforms and environments. The developer can run multiple versions of Windows, Linux, etc allowing him/her to develop, design, and test his/her products on different operating systems than the one the developer is currently using. That's not to say virtual machines are perfect though. For one thing virtual machines may require quite a bit of hard drive space as the end user is running one or more operating systems inside another. It also requires a fairly modern PC with enough ram and CPU power to run two or more operating systems concurrently. For a new PC this isn't really a problem, but it is advisable to have enough memory to run both operating systems and applications at the same time. I've noticed, for instance, if I don't give XP at least 512 MB of ram of its own the virtual machine runs too slow for running screen readers and games on the virtual machine. The other downside is cost. Many end users got their copies of Windows as a bundle with their old PC, and do not own or have a full retail copy for general use. They just have the stock OEM versions supplied by their manufacturer. This means there may be a small fee involved in having to purchase an older copy of Windows--such as Windows XP Basic--to run inside a virtual machine. Although, this is not an ideal situation it isn't a deal breaker. Copies of Windows XP can be purchased from software retailers like http://www.buycheapsoftware.com for under $100. Which is fairly reasonable in order to maintain maximum backwards compatibility and still keep your new OS at the same time. In conclusion while technology is rapidly advancing, technology is changing daily, and older software is being left behind there is still a fairly simple solution for this problem.Virtual machines like VirtualBox, VMWare Player, VMWare Workstation, and VMWare Fusion are the ideal solution for those who want to upgrade to a new PC or switch to a different operating system and still run your older Windows games and software. So if you are having troubles playing that favorite game of yesterday on your new Windows 7 64-bit PC a virtual machine might just be what the doctor ordered. --- Gamers mailing list __ [email protected] If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to [email protected]. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. 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