Understanding why some games before XP will or wont work?

Im an older guy who like the rest of us back in 1995 descovered the computer, Internet etc...

I have close friendships with guys whom were working for well known PC Gaming companys like Blizzard Entertainment, Interplay etc....and Im best friends with a
guy named Ron Millar, who was top designer and 1 of the 3 people who were responsible for Warcraft, Diablo, Starcraft. And most recently a game called Gobblincomander.

With that said, I really got a first hand look at and was able to learn some ins and outs of what at that time was cutting edge. However Ive been away from a computer for quite awhile and alot has changed!

I love alot of games from that time as some audio programs that came preinstalled in the operating system such as "Audioview.exe" a wav editor I believed came packaged through Voyetra.

I want to play my "Redneck Rampage" game and "Full Throttle"
Vesa drivers and Audio codec's are just a little bit of some of the issues
with Redneck, Full Throttle will load but is alittle shakey soundcard matters are alittle challenging but a little punching around will provide my sound to work on that....

Can someone tell me what Im dealing with and is there a possible why to fix, modifiy, or come to terms that them day are gone.

Ive finnally gotten my own computer just a month ago, HP -2.7ghz / 40gig HD

 

Hi Vpoint
You could try running the games in XPs compatibility mode
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;292533&Product=winxp

 

Welcome to MG VPoint1. There are a few of us "older guys" here.

There are several problems with older games and compatibility.The biggest difference is in how NT based operating systems handle hardware. Windows 9x was actually built on top of DOS, and shared a lot of the same underpinnings. NT has no DOS basis whatsoever. DOS and Windows 9x allowed programs and games to control hardware directly. NT based systems (including Windows 2000 and XP) do NOT. The operating system controls hardware, all the time, and applications simply tell Windows what they want to do. This is actually a safer way to handle it, as with the older systems, an improper command or conflict would almost always crash the entire system, requiring a hard reboot to get back up again, which isn't good for the system, plus the annoyance factor. Since Windows XP maintains full control, it's more common to see a game or an application crash "to the desktop", and and not crash the whole system. WinXP also provides for more IRQs than the traditional 15 that date back to the DOS days. Motherboards still only have 15, but Windows handles hardware allocation, and creates more (more are needed today on a lot of systems). Again, that's a good thing, but some very old games would only work with specific hardware on specific IRQs. Sound especially; a lot of old games will only work with the soundcard as IRQ5, I/O port 220. And today your soundcard might be on IRQ 19. Memrory allocation is also a problem. A lot of old games insisted on putting things in memory at specific memory locations, and would choke if those weren't available, and those may be reserved for other functions today. As General Lee Stoned noted, WinXP has compatibility modes that emulate older systems, and can fool older programs into working with XPs more rigid hardware handling. A lot of older games that wouldn't work in Win98 will work in XP, but compatibility isn't perfect. Some old programs simply refuse to work.

Newer hardware and hardware drivers can also be a problem, and there may be unresolvable conflicts with hardware. Things have changed a LOT since the old ISA bus days.

Early DirectX games may also not work with newer versions of DirectX. Even on the same operating system. DX is supposed to be backward compatible, but it's never been 100%.

Best hope for running very old games on a new system is to experiment with WinXP's compatibility modes, and see if you can fool the game, or program, into thinking it's in an older system. That works a lot of the time. Beyond that, some of them games are simply gone, unless the game maker re-writes the game to work on a current system. And that has happened in a few cases.