Transferring a Game

I just bought a 100 GB external hard drive and was wondering if I transferred the folders and software from Rise of Nations from one computer to the next, would they work if I tried playing it on the computer that I sent it to.

 

Most likely not, you still need registry entries on the new computer, and maybe some other DLL's.

 

Probably not. Depends on the game, but most things get themselves embedded into the registry so that they won't run except where they were installed. I frankly think that it's a crock, as there are plenty of complex apps that'll run off of an external drive (OpenOffice.org, Firefox, even the software from the company I used to work for, www.3dnature.com, etc.), but they just don't because programmers are lazy and/or they just don't care about making their program more accessible.

 

i have quite a few games that i have just copied from one comp to another(and worked) including Warcraft 3, nfsu2 Wow and heapes of older games like AOE2, EE2, etc

so i reckon give it a shot

 

I would say nearly all games released in the past couple of years require registry entries and thus would not be portable. Then there's also the built in copy protection for games because, well, the game companies don't want to sell one game and have it be played for free on multiple computers. Your best bet would be to image your old hard drive and reimage it on the new hard drive.

 

Actually, when I rebooted my computer, I copied all the my games from my internal HDs to an external HD. Then when I reinstalled windows, I copied the games from the external HD to the internal. Basically, what happens is that I can run the games provided that the disk was in the drive (as usual), and I clicked on the shortcut for the game that could be found where the games was installed. The only thing that is different is that you select play the game off the disc because all it wants to do is install since the registry entries aren't there.

BTW, I did this for all my steam games, FEAR, all CoD, Far Cry, etc. Mostly newer games. Also, if you are just concerned about copying over your saves, it is pretty easy to do. You just need to find the save files. Hope that helps a bit.

 

Thanks for the info Imark84I I was wondering about the samething for when I build a new gaming PC.