Back around 2020 or so I wanted to play old games because I only had an underpowered laptop that could barely play modern games.
One I downloaded off MyAbandonWare was this shooter from 2003 called Devastation. It’s alright, but more I played it when I was younger and always wondered what happened to it.
On my old laptop it always crashed on startup and I just couldn’t get it working. I could open the level editor and that was about it.
Recently I downloaded it again onto a new laptop I put Linux on and tried a few different configurations. I heard how WINE can be better than Windows for old software so I decided to give it a shot.
Eventually I used Bottles with a gaming configuration set to Windows Xp.
I tried Devastation with that setup and it worked. I still have an issue with the game being in the top left corner and not taking up the full screen, but it’s playable.
I have a top spec gaming PC now running Windows 10, but there are things this Thinkpad can do that my big PC can’t.
I’m pretty sure compatibility mode in Windows hasn’t actually done anything after Windows 7. There were a few games and programs I had running on Win7 using the XP compatibility mode, but using the same setting on Win10 did nothing.
Windows 10 also seemed to be the time many games started needing community made patches to run even if the game worked fine on 7.
Yeah, I have a similar situation with Borderlands 2 not running on my machine with Windows 7 but running just fine in Linux with Proton (which is Steam’s branch of Wine).
It seems to me that Linux with Wine is actually better at backwards compatibility for Windows applications than Windows itself.
PS: Also a handful of old games I have from GoG that wouldn’t run on Windows run just fine with Wine on Linux.
Wine is kinda magical. I really like this old 16bit Windows 3.x game “Castle of The Winds” (topdown, turn based, roguelike) which doesn’t run on any 64bit windows as is (though, you CAN, with https://github.com/otya128/winevdm, but iirc it was a bit finicky).
Wine runs CoTW fine, seemingly.
windows can still play castle of the winds? i play it all the time. In fact, i just booted it up again a moment ago to make sure it didnt break recently or something. I dont remember ever having any issues playing it, and ive played it off and on for decades. In fact, googling real quick, it looks like my abandonware even has a “easy installer” for it.
I tested the game quite a bit and found it not working, and after some digging around I found some tidbits that 64bit windows’ lack the old systems to run 16bit apps.
Kinda sounds like the installer supplied winevdm or similar with the game. Pretty nice of them, tbh.
I did something similar just the other day.
As a kid I really enjoyed Populous The Beginning. I only ever had the demo version. I later bought the game on GOG, but it never ran that well on my computer. You had to use software based graphics acceleration so it didn’t look right, would have issues with the sound, and crash fairly often.
Tried it through Lutris the other day and it just works. Flawlessly. The graphics look right, there are no audio distortions, and so far I’ve not crashed at all. I’d like to figure out how to get it to run in windowed mode, and then I’ll be satisfied.
Big win for WINE.
Super cool from a games preservation perspective!
I’m super frustrated that for some reason, Sid Meyer’s SimGolf doesn’t run on any emulation or modern hardware. It was just a friggin windows 95 game!! I have no idea what’s so special about it.
Have you tried a virtual machine? It should work.
Not really a solution for the game specifically, but there’s a spiritual-successor of sorts for it, “Golftopia”. It is a bit scifi/neon themed, but does a similar thing.
