Windows ME and backwards compatibility

[Flubber]

My computer system uses Windows ME . . . . I have a CD with a number of card games that I had not played since before I got this computer but which worked fine on my old machine. The game requirements are windows 95 or 3.1. attempting to start it either through the start menu OR by clicking on the appropriate drive itself, always ended in failure with a flash of a message that said something about dividing a number by 0-- It sometimes offers to "install' but then does nothing if you click this choice.

Is there some easy step to allow me to play this older game??

If there is, please give it to me in simple steps as I am VERY far from being a computer whiz. Thanks for any help you might be able to give.

[Dinner]

ME just plain sucks. It has problems with XP based software and old 95/98 software. 2000 is almost just as bad.

[Skanky Burns]

Probably the easiest way for a non-computer whiz is to make a dos boot disk, then when you boot into dos load win3.1 and run the games from there. Of course, you will have to install a copy of win3.1 somewhere on your h/d. I don't know where it defaults to, but don't install it in your c:\windows directory - it could cause problems for WinME.

The best way would be to install XP.

[Flubber]

So XP is backwards compatible with the old stuff ??

I agree that ME sucks-- I have learned to accept far too many inexplicable crashes and freeze-ups . It might be worthwhile to get XP but the one thing that ME does seem to run well is SMAX and I fear screwing that up

[Skanky Burns]

Yes. It has specific compatibility modes for 95, 98, etc that allow you to run older games. It doesn't work with all games though, so you should make a quick check in the SMAC forums that the game will still run on XP.

[Q Classic]

XP is largely backwards compatible.

to get sound for dos programs, however, you might want to download something called VDMSound, which you have to activate by right clicking on the file and then selecting the "Run with VDMS..." option.

[Flubber]

Originally posted by Skanky Burns
Yes. It has specific compatibility modes for 95, 98, etc that allow you to run older games. It doesn't work with all games though, so you should make a quick check in the SMAC forums that the game will still run on XP.

People are running smax with xp with some minor modifications to the game although IP games seem to have ongoing difficulties. I'm a regular in the smac/x forums.

[Flubber]

So the early consensus is that ME is such a pile of crap that I should get XP or have a second OS such as 3.1 to use to run older games. I guess thats what I will have to do. I was hoping that I was missing some easy "click a different button in a menu" type fix.

{rant mode on} why the %&$%$#@#@ do they spew out multiple operatng systems with compatibility problems -- the %$%#%%#^ers !! {rant mode off}

[Q Classic]

well, microsoft did badly with ME.

seems like what they did was take the basic chassis of 98, upgraded it a bit, and then cut out the dos underpinnings with a hacksaw.

[Dinner]

Originally posted by Flubber
So XP is backwards compatible with the old stuff ??

I agree that ME sucks-- I have learned to accept far too many inexplicable crashes and freeze-ups . It might be worthwhile to get XP but the one thing that ME does seem to run well is SMAX and I fear screwing that up

It is with a partition. Without the partition it is hard to run a program which uses a DOS shell.

[Asher]

WinMe sucked ass (aside from the first implementation of System Restore), for a bunch of reasons.

Mostly, the Win9x sourcecode was messy and baroque, changing one little thing screwed up everything else. It's why they totally ditched it and moved to the far cleaner, well-designed WinNT codebase.

All of the good software engineers were diverted to work on Whistler (WinXP) as it had much higher priority.

A lot of the WinMe features were cut out before the beta (like the all new My Games subsystem, which will now debut in Windows Longhorn...), leaving some holes that never were filled.

It was a total mess, a craptastic OS...

Win98SE remains the best Win9x OS.

[Flubber]

So asher -- based on that descripytion, I am guessing that there is no easy fix so I can run my old cd card game and the best answer is to move to XP ??

What does xp cost these days anyway ??

[Asher]

I really don't know much about running old programs, I never do it.

What I'd do is leave your WinMe installed, get a program like Partition Magic, and install Windows XP on a different partition. Then if you have a problem in XP with something, you could boot into WinMe and use it still.

I'm not sure if XP will run your game though.

[Skanky Burns]

Checking in the SMAC forum, many others are playing SMAC on XP. So yeah, that specific one will work.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by Oerdin
ME just plain sucks. It has problems with XP based software and old 95/98 software. 2000 is almost just as bad.

Win2K trades compatibility for stability by choice - it never intended to be all things to all people, or have mass compatability across all the Windows platform products. With strictly Win2k/NT compliant software, though, it is the most stable of the Windows OS's by far.

ME is just an abortion, though. It is the least stable Windows OS by far, even going back to the pre-Win 3.0 shells. And that's saying a lot.