Playing 10 year old+ PC Games on a New Laptop

[rastapasta]

Good Afternoon

I just found some old PC games such as Motogp 2 and WRC. Therfore a Question:

How likely is it that a 10 year old game (ie one released ten or more years ago) will work on a brand new but run of the mil laptop??.

will it run but be glitchy?? or how do these things go generally??

many thanks

[bloomen]

Total lottery. Windows 10 is actually pretty good at elderly stuff in my experience but some never work. It's worth googling the games you're interested in if they don't work well as there may well be a patch or workaround.

I have a few that must be over 20 years old that work fine without any mods. I can run Richard Burns Rally on a piddly Atom powered tablet.

[Zetec-S]

Assuming you don't already have one, your biggest problem will be finding a modern laptop with a DVD drive.

(ok, not quite a "problem", but something to bear in mind as most these days don't have one built in)

[rastapasta]

Zetec-S said:

Assuming you don't already have one, your biggest problem will be finding a modern laptop with a DVD drive.

(ok, not quite a "problem", but something to bear in mind as most these days don't have one built in)

yeah i have that bizarrely enough, I got a Lenovo V155 which came with a DVD drive.

[anonymous-user]

Tried running my old CoD2 and CoD UO games a few weeks back. Best games ever !

Sadly neither will run on my high end PC Specialists curved monitor PC. The screen res isn't supported, and even lowering this to a res that is supported doesn't work and misses parts of the screen off. Multiplayer won't run at all even with every combination of compatibility tried and other stuff (DirectX etc) installed and de-installed etc.

Have decided if I want to run them I need to buy a nice little Win7 AIO... bit of a nuisance as I recently tipped about 8 old PCs/laptops (all working but no one wants old Win7 stuff with only 4GB RAM etc nowadays) Wish I'd kept one for my old games.

[bangerhoarder]

Depends on the game and the community. Some old games have had staggering effort put into making them work on modern PCs - things like the early NFS games, NOLF, things like Thief etc. With persistence you can get them working, and often looking amazing with high frame rates and maxed settings. Resolution support is always an issue - widescreen patches are sometimes made, and some games (like Unreal Tournament) have extremely flexible resolutions based off config files.

Fun trying them out though, even if the game isn’t as good as you remember!

[Type R Tom]

I backed up on old HDD drive to my PC recently, mainly for photos but came across my old games, including Solider of Fortune 1 & 2. They were both amazing at time and probably still up there for gore! Clicked on them but wouldn't start, you can buy SoF 2 now but I may go hunting around the loft for the original DVD's.

Last time I needed to install with a DVD I mapped my laptop DVD as a network drive so I could access it on my PC which doesn't have one.

[dapprman]

You could try Dosbox but I found it more miss than hit unless you really know what you're doing. I have actually re-bought some of my old games through the likes of GoG.com and Steam - these work, however ones for old CRT screens tend to end up in small boxes or be rather pixelated when full screen (if you can - not all games will).

[FourWheelDrift]

If it doesn't run you can right click on the game and select compatibility and try running it older windows compatibility mode. But more than likely you won't need to, you might also go online for newer patches/updates for a DVD installed game too.