Windows 10: Compatibility issues with XP-era and earlier games

I replaced my son's museum-piece PC (running XP and purchased in 2007, and somehow no problems, ever, with it) this week with an all-in-one Windows 10 one. He went from having the worst/oldest computer in the house, to having the newest.

The only weak link is that he had some games that were sentimental favorites (think "Backyard Baseball"), that don't run or install now, including exposing the installer and the program exe files to compatibility mode.

On the "urgency continuum" this is low.

But on principle, I'd like to see if I can make these games work. Any suggestions?

I found an emulator (ScummVM), the workings of which are documented on pages like Backyard Baseball (CD Windows) Game < ScummVM Games | Emuparadise - can't tell if this solves my problem, but looking for perspective here, please.

:)

 

Last Win 10 update, lot of old games stopped working

10/26/15

After the last Win 10 update, a lot of my old games stopped working. I get window not compatible or the mouse is not working right anymore. I'm about to go back to win 7 or XP. As Microsoft update Win 10 I'm have more and more problem getting games from
the XP era to work. Star wars "empire at war" ; Stronghold 2 and the new Baldur Gate Enhanced have all stop working. I'm having issues with Divinity and with Axis and allies locking up.

Does Microsoft test these update before they put they out there?

 

Age Of empires 2 Conquerors edition incompatible with Win10?

Hi there. I have recently updated to Windows 10 on my PC (Which is relatively young and still runs many modern and games of the era of AoE 2). I went to play my game (Which is the disk version from when it was a new game) and found it WILL not launch.
It get's as far as the autorun and then the game will not play. I am hoping that there is an easy way to fix this. I have it trying to run in compatibility mode with Windows XP service pack 3.

 

There's usually 2 problems when going from WinXP or WinVista, sometimes Win7, to Win10. One is the version of Win10, whether 32-bit or 64-bit, WinXP Professional had either version but other versions were only 32-bit. The other issue involves hardware and software drivers for WinXP that usually don't work with Win10. Using a VM/Virtual Machine "may" work but again the hardware drivers for things like games may not be available. I have kept a "museum piece" WinXP only because the BIOS on the motherboard supports 2 floppy drives [newer ones support only 1 drive or none at all] and I have a 3.5" and 5.25" combination drive in it plus an Iomega 250MB Zip drive, useful when clients find old disks they either need the data from or just want to see what it is.

 

You can try running the game using vmware. But it'll require a 64-bit version of windows. What's the specs of your son's PC?

 

I have seen problems with DirectX and games with versions 7 and earlier. Problems with games for Dx9 can usually be overcome by attempting install of Dx9 distro which just ads few parts without ruining anything else. Never tried installing earlier versions. There was also a slew of 16bit games and that's impossible to run on 64bit windows of any kind.
There were few games I still have and would like to play again but now they wouldn't play even in W7 any more. I had a pretty lousy computer at that time (XP) and would love to play them again on this HW but can't even get XP to run on it. No compatibility modes work either.

 

Not sure of every detail, but it's 64-bit, for sure.

 

If an older game used a SecureRom driver to implement digital rights management then it won't install properly since Win10 considers this a security risk and will not install it. You can see a list of the games that use SecureRom by Googling SecureRom.

 

GTA IV still uses SecuROM and it worked fine on my desktop (Windows 10 Pro 64-bit)

 

You probably play it through Steam, right? Steam manages DRM without SecureRom. I can tell you unequivocally that SecureRom.sys will not be installed by Win10.

 

I'm using the retail version.

 

How is that possible. I'm very curious. Are you using a "No CD" add on?

 

I don't even know how it works but I'm not using any of those. Just to save me some headaches of scratched disk all I did is to create an image file of the play disc then just mount it. Nothing incriminatory.

 

Thanks for the info. Glad you're able to play it without problems.