[Countach69]

Playing newer games on Windows 98SE.

As anyone ever heard of an XP wrapper? I would like to be able to play some newer game/demo on Windows 98SE but unfortunately some games, like the upcoming F.E.A.R., will not start du to some silly variation in function calls. Take the aforementionned F.E.A.R. demo, using the program Dependency Walker you notice those 3 slight variations in two dll file. Hardly justifiable to limit/ban Windows 98SE users. The same applies to many new game like The Chronicles of Riddick, Medal of Honor Pacific Assault etc. Anybody would like to comment?


Kernel32.dll
Windows XP: GetFileSizeEx
Windows 98SE : GetFileSize

Kernel32.dll
Windows XP: SetFilePointerEx
Windows 98SE : SetFilePointer

Shell32.dll
Windows XP: SHGetFolderPathA
Windows 98SE : SHGetSpecialFolderPathA

[wizardofwindows]

a wrapper would rock. how bout it techno geeks.

[Tihiy]

Countach69, on Aug 29 2005, 03:46 PM, said:

Kernel32.dll
Windows XP: GetFileSizeEx
Windows 98SE : GetFileSize

Kernel32.dll
Windows XP: SetFilePointerEx
Windows 98SE : SetFilePointer

Shell32.dll
Windows XP: SHGetFolderPathA
Windows 98SE : SHGetSpecialFolderPathA
<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Can you just replace that strings in exes/dlls with hex editor? Will game run?

[Countach69]

Unfortunately you cannot use the HEX Editor approach, or the one i call "The DOOM3 GlobalMemoryStatusEx to GlobalMemoryStatus" switch on this one. It worked flawlessly i might add; i completed DOOM3 twice on Windows 98SE without a single crash or incident whatsoever.

They got a little wiser now but not much. With the F.E.A.R. demo you cannot replace the string without overwritting part of another string. Alas my programming skills are not up to the task. Maybe we should contact the author of 3D-Analyze at http://www.tommti-systems.com/ to see if he would be gracious enough to help the Windows 98SE community; he did it for the non-TnL video card owner so why not!

Countach69

[Tihiy]

Quote

Unfortunately you cannot use the HEX Editor approach, or the one i call "The DOOM3 GlobalMemoryStatusEx to GlobalMemoryStatus" switch on this one. It worked flawlessly i might add; i completed DOOM3 twice on Windows 98SE without a single crash or incident whatsoever.

To solve SHGetFolderPathA dependancy, install my 98 Revolutions Pack (with care!) (http://tihiy.ahanix.org) discussed in Unofficial Service Pack subforum or 98SE2ME with option 3. Or you can replace that string with any other shorter non-sense function.

[Jlo555]

Uggh, I hate the gaming companies in general now for this very reason. When I was discussing something like this incident with GTA: San Andreas, I actually did email rockstar games tech support and I believe my exact words were:
"I am very disappointed about your lack of support for windows 98 in Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. There are still a lot of win98 users out there who have the hardware capability to play the game, but can’t because the game runs like crap on 98. I strongly urge Rockstar to release a patch for san andreas for people who still run that operating system. The game runs fine on my hardware under 2000/XP, but on 98SE, the game works fine for a brief moment, then is extremely laggy, and sometimes crashes. I’ve already updated my video driver and all the other drivers for my computer and am still plagued with this problem. My video card is an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro with the latest catalyst. I’ve tried every configuration in the san andreas settings with no results. Releasing San Andreas with the lack of support for both windows 98 and Windows Me was a horrible idea on your part, and you probably lost many customers because of that."

They responded with: "It says on the box that only Windows 2000/XP are supported."

In other words, they don't really care. But luckily, in the case of san andreas, I was able to get past the lagginess/crappiness of the game performance by turning down audio acceleration. We should lead a revolt against the game developers for not supported older OS's, it's really starting to p*** me off!!

[atomizer]

Jlo555, on Aug 30 2005, 09:21 PM, said:

Uggh, I hate the gaming companies in general now for this very reason...

...They responded with: "It says on the box that only Windows 2000/XP are supported."

In other words, they don't really care...
<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

i wouldn't say they don't care. it's simply a financially motivated decision as to whether or not their game should be built with support for an old OS. i would guess that decision is affected by things like:

1) how much extra work would it take to support 98?
2) if we get it to run well on 98, how does the NT user suffer?
3) how many people still use 98?

quite simply, they care about making money, like any business. if they determine that support for 98 doesn't make good financial sense, then they have little motivation to implement it. although i can see your point, it's not at all fair to blame "them" because they don't cater to "your" OS. look at the *nix community, which is growing day by day. few game companies choose to support that platform probably because it's just not profitable... yet. even the developer of the most popular online FPS in history, Valve (Half-Life/HL2/CS/CS:S), doesn't do a Linux client.

[Jlo555]

Well, from what it sounds like, they're purposly making newer games not playable on 98se. That's they're fault. They "could" just say the games are untested on anything but 2000/XP, but let the game run on older OS's anyway, and leave it to the consumer to attempt to make it run properly on their system.

[MDGx]

my 2 ¢

As said before, marketing and profit are the only purposes gaming companies are driven by when selling new games.
But we can't blame them [entirely, anyway] for dropping support for 9x platforms, because MS is the 1 who ended the "life cycle" of these OSes in the 1st place:
http://www.microsoft...dows/lifecycle/
and every business/person who wants to successfully sell/license/etc software, must [are forced to] or should follow into MS's footsteps.
This means if MS does not support an OS anymore, nobody else can on their own, because they all rely on MS for most part [patches, fixes, updates, MSKB articles, MS TechNet, MSDN etc]. And this includes all OEMs, developers, retailers, vendors, publishers etc.
So if any game developer/publisher was to still support 9x OSes on their own, they must provide custom patches/fixes [not only for their games, but also for the OS if necessary], and that's not possible [and probably also against MS EULA] without MS's "blessing" and help.

... But that doesn't stop me from playing Doom 3 [with a "patch"] on 98SE.

[Jlo555]

The Microsoft end user license agreement is the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen. I'll press the "agree" button or "f8" when I install windows, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to follow it. It's kind of sad (disturbing?) to see a multi-billion dollar company drop support on a widely used product so they can become a multi-trillion dollar company. I always thought that MS's worst enemies were pirates, then I read in the paper that it was their own older products. Just think, when Vista comes out, microsoft will HATE XP's guts. I do think that someone should try to write a program or something that will trick games written for only XP to run on 98. If people managed to do that on Linux (made an awesome app called WineX, now it's called Cedega), I think people would be able to do it on windows 98.

This post has been edited by Jlo555: 31 August 2005 - 03:26 PM

[Countach69]

Windows 98SE and Quake iv.

On a follow-up note, Quake 4 uses the DOOM3 "engine" so just replace the string GlobalMemoryStatusEx with GlobalMemoryStatus in the Quake4.exe and Quake4Ded.exe with a Hex Editor. Same as DOOM 3. Played about an half an hour so far; works fine. Only glitch on MY system is the use of the mouse 2 button; probably video card related or game related but nothing serious.

Countach69

[Jlo555]

ahh, sweet, thanks for putting windows 98 back in the game (literally.)

[MDGx]

Countach69, on Oct 26 2005, 03:50 PM, said:

Windows 98SE and Quake iv.

On a follow-up note, Quake 4 uses the DOOM3 "engine" so just replace the string GlobalMemoryStatusEx with GlobalMemoryStatus in the Quake4.exe and Quake4Ded.exe with a Hex Editor. Same as DOOM 3. Played about an half an hour so far; works fine. Only glitch on MY system is the use of the mouse 2 button; probably video card related or game related but nothing serious.

Countach69

"Hail to the king, baby!"
from the film Army of Darkness:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106308/

[suta]

Age Of Empire 3 only support on XP, Anyone can help? to make it playable on 98.
thx