Posted earlier for free Command and Conquer, been busy playing it after work, is just so good to play these old games…

Found that many older games does not work under Windows XP, so I search for some solution online, and it came out with a few tricks for us to once more enjoy these great games on XP/Vista:

1/: Remember to select “Compatibility mode” by right click the exe, Properties, Compatibility, in “Compatibility mode”, select “Windows 95”, also select “Disable visual themes” and “Turn off advance text input services for this program.”

2/: Many of these older games do still have updates, update to the latest version is also a good idea.
(latest? haha, some of the patches were released in 1999)

3/: Not that much warez related, once upon a time many hackers release no-cd patch to older games, the main reason of these no-cd patch was to speed game load up time with game data copied to HDD, and of coz, warez issue (1CD everyone play).
In our case, cd protection used in some older game fails to work under Windows XP, example SimCity 3000 (not the Unlimited edition), due to the strong CD protection it does not work under XP, and no-cd patch fix the problem.
(Think same as CnC RedAlert 2)

4/: If all fail, try Virtual PC with a minimum Win9X install, as these older games do only require very very limited CPU resources in today’s standard, they should run fine.
(Like I was playing SimCity 2000, I remember it was released in the 486 age, was it 33MHz?)

Running SimCity 2000 under a Dual-Core 1.8 GHz CPU with 2GB of RAM is just…………..fast…..

One thing I would like is running these older game in Window mode instead of the full screen mode, which I cannot seems to be able to get this work. (I do still check email, IM-ing, while playing the game….), and other than the VPC solution I can’t seems to be able to find and working solution, anyone got some good idea?