Older gemes on vista - problems possible?

Hi guys,

following thing happened to me:
I installed "World Racing 2" on my machine with Vista Home Premium. it contains those crappy Starforce Copy Protection drivers. After installation, I got an error message that these drivers are not compatible with vista and Vista asked me, if the programm was installed correctly. I just clicked yes and solved the protection driver problem with an update from the Starforce website.
Afterwards, the game worked, but I encountered some general problems with my system. Some notification icons in the taskbar were missing and I got weird error messages 2 or three times. As the game didn't run very well anyway, I removed it and also the protection drivers. Since then, all problems seem to have disappeared.

I can't tell 100% if the problems were caused by the game (or more likely the drivers), but, I assume so.

Anyone else encountered problems like this?

And the general question: Do you think it's safe to install older games which were not made for Vista? I read about one guy who thinks installing a game messed up his whole vista - hmmm...
Anyone with similar problems affecting the whole system?

Thank you for answers!

Cheers
Tobi

 

I have run into multiple issues where older games simply won't start or run properly in Vista, but so far, knock on wood, nothing system wide has been an issue. People do hate Starforce though, so that could have been the problem. Curious what others have experienced, as I do fairly regularly try out old games.

 

I have vista, I installed Virtual machine, downloaded XP for it and was playin gmy game from 1996 without problems

 

Yeah, of course I can't tell for sure it was not just a coincidence that I had problems only as long I had the drivers installed, but still it seems suspicious to me.

Bot in all, sounds like severe problems are not very likely when installing older software? So, I'll maybe try some more games

Cheers
Tobi

 

I would give them a shot, as my most common problem is they simply won't run properly. But, a lot of them do, or there's a fairly simple fix, so definitely worth playing with if it's a game you like.

 

For the handful of older games I like, I rebought them at www.gog.com. They are only $5.99 or $9.99 and are guaranteed to work in XP and Vista (and hopefully Win 7) and no DRM crap. You buy it, you own it.

 

For older games that have been modified to run on XP and Vista check out Good Old Games, link below. A lot of classics and adding new ones all the time. Most games are $5.99, DRM free. Site was started by the company who produced The Witcher, I believe and a lot of them were older game enthusiasts !


http://www.gog.com/en/frontpage/

 

I have a library of games going back to the 80's and I must say I was impressed with Vista being able to run just about all of them. Most the time the problems I ran into were sound related since Vista did away with dedicated sound cards and moved sound over to the CPU instead. Mostly the ones that had issues were games that had EAX options and even if I turned those off I still ran into problems. I've yet to find a solution to get System Shock 2 stable and I've run just about every tweak I could find or think of, nothing seems to work. I have a dual boot laptop with XP Pro and Vista Home Premium so there are only a few that I cant get to work on my laptop. Unfortunately System Shock 2 was one of my favorite games, its a classic! *sigh*