I am sorry for the long post, but I thought you may like to know about a trick to emulate Win95/98 and make games to run on XP. I am not sure about Vista or Win7.
It is useful when you want to install or run some games for Win 95/98. For some reason, games that use versions prior to DirectX5 do not seem to work.
One thing you could try is to use the Windows
Application Compatability Toolkit (ACT) to force the computer to emulate a slow CPU. Exact instructions follow:
1. If you don't have the compatability toolkit, get it from
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/deta ... laylang=enYou need to download the file "Application Compatibility Toolkit.msi"
Notice that it requres .NET Framework to run, so if you do not have it, ACT will tell you which version of .NET you need to download.
2. Open the Compatibility Administrator Tool.
3. On the left side of the window, under "Custom Databases", there should be an entry entitled "New Database" or something similar. Right-click on it, click on it and select "Create New/Application Fix" from the menu.
3a. If there is not a new database entry already present, create one by selecting "File/New" from the menu bar, then continue as above.
4. Enter the location of the exe file in the dialog box. For example "C:\Program Files\Activision\Battlezone\BZone.exe". Click Next.
5. Where it asks you to select compatibility modes to be applied to the program, select the appropriate operating system you want. Just hit Next.
6. You should be at the compatibility fixes screen. Normally the default options may work, but for some games you may need to scroll down until you find "EmulateSlowCPU", and click the check box next to it. If you are going to run a game in software mode, also click the check box next to "ForceDirectDrawEmulation", otherwise leave it blank. Leave everything else blank. Click Next.
Note: Setting "ForceDirectDrawEmulation" will turn off 3d acceleration automatically when launching the program, thus relieving you of the difficulty of opening dxdiag every single time you want to run the game.
7. On the matching information screen, just accept the default options. Click the Finish button. The dialog box should close.
8. Repeat instructions 3 to 7 for any other game you have that needs compatibility options.
9. Click the save button at the top of the window. Name your new database, and save it somewhere on your hard drive (it really doesn't matter where).
10. Right-click on the database you just saved, and choose "Install" from the drop-down menu.
11. You're done! Close the compatibility administrator and run the game.
Note: If you have enabled Win 95/98/ME compatability, disable it before applying this fix.
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Emulating 3DFX graphicsWith the patches that FAQ section already offers you do not need 3DFX emulation for Battlezone.
However it is useful to know about options for other games.
dgVoodoo Glide wrapper
http://dege.freeweb.hu/Some games work perfectly (pre-rendered in-game movies included) with v1.40 of the dgVoodoo wrapper (and hopefully all subsequent releases as well).
To use this wrapper with either game, extract/copy the following files from the dgVoodoo archive into the root game directory (whereever you installed the game to; e.g. C:\games\GameDirectory )
glide2x.dll
glide2x.ovl
dgVoodoo.vxd
dgVoodooSetup.exe
Only these four files are needed. Next run dgVoodooSetup.exe (the new copy in the game directory!), select the "Glide" tab, and under "LFB Access" select the "Closer to real hardware" checkbox. This will prevent some confusing 'ghosting' problems that can occur in the game's full-screen mode.
You may in addition wish to enable dgVoodoo's "windowed mode" option. This enables the entire game to run in a window, which can be invaluable if you have CTD (crash to desktop) issues with the game, as your desktop resolution and colour depth will not be affected by a CTD. To enable windowed mode, go to the "Global" tab in dgVoodooSetup, and select the "Windowed mode" checkbox.
Now run the game! You can choose both the resolution for Glide/3Dfx video modes, or for the best possible display quality, try setting the Resolution (under the Glide tab in dgVoodooSetup) to a higher resolution. Some aspects of the game such as the menus and the in-game will still render at an effective low res, but if the consequent scaling is by a factor of an integer number, there would be no resulting artifacts. On-screen 3D objects will benefit from the higher resolution, however! Having said that, the scaling can cause the pre-rendered video performance to suffer quite noticeably, so you may still prefer to stick to lower resolutions.
I do not recommend further modifications to the default configuration. In particular, do NOT force triple buffering (under Glide - Miscellaneous) or you will likely suffer problems with some in-game movies in some games.
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Also, as an alternate 3DFX emulator you may use Zeckensacks Glide Wrapper here:
http://www.zeckensack.de/glide/index.htmlSet pagefile/virtual memory to 512MB or less.
Apparently 1GB system RAM is max that works.
May need older Nvidia drivers.
May not be possible to get it to work with Geforce 6 series as drivers that work with 5 (FX) series are from before 6 series were supported. [I'm actually unsure about this bit]
No known problems with ATI drivers.
If performance is poor, turn off motion blur in glide wrapper settings.
Comstar
