Old M & M games

[ve6tp]

Hi:

My all time favorite games were the Might and Magic series. Really miss them.

I have a new CPU. Usinig ASUS P4P800 SE Motherboard clock speed 3.2 Gig, with 1 Gig RAM, 80 gig hard drive, etc. Happy with the computer but I do not like the XP Pro operatinig system I have.

I can not get any of my M & M games to run with this system. Simply refuses to install them. My graphics card is the Hightech Radeon 9600XT 256 MB.

I've tried just about everything I can think of including selecting the option on XP for compatability running of Win"98 but no luck.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

regards,
ve6tp

 

[Darth_Terra1]

I dont play the M and M series but i think they are of the old generation of games ie upto win98 maybe less then that, forgive me if i am wrong about this, it may be that the game you are trying to install needs to be installed on a fat32 file system, your Xp system with the size of your hard disk would most likely be a NTFS file system i could be wrong, check to see what your hard disk is set at ie fat32 or NTFS.

if NTFS check to see if the game is compatible with win NT4 if so select the NT4 compatiblity option within XP that may work, if it isn't NT compatible and your hard disk is NTFS based you could try to partition some of your hard disk and format that to fat32 although you would need a utility such as partition magic to do that if you dont want to wipe everything and start from scratch.

if your Hard disk is fat32 it may be that your game is just not compatible with XP no matter what you try, some old games are like this. i hope this is of some help to you.

 

[ve6tp]

Hi Darth_Terra1:

First, let me thank you for taking the timie to try and help me. I appreciate that very much.

I think your suggestion about my hard drives running on NTFS and causing the compatability problem, is right on the money. I am using NTFS.

I am not too egar to partiition part of my drives, I've just got this mental block about doing that. But, what I will look into is the possibility of installing another small hard drive dedicated to gaming and configuring it for fat 32. That may be the answer.

However, if this is to work, the game would have to provide me with the option of selecting the Hard Drive I want it install on. I will run my installatioln for the game again and check this out. I don't think that option is there. I believe it automatically installs onto the C drive. If that is the casse, then I'm dead in the water ....

Again, my thanks for all your time and help. A very reasonable suggestion. By the way, I did try all the "compatibility" options including NT4. No luck ...

Take care.

Regards,
ve6tp

 

[Darth_Terra1]

I'm glad i was of some use for you, your suggestion of a second hard drive is a good one, i dont know if you have any of your old OS discs ie win98 win95, if so you could install that on the second drive and duel boot, and use that OS for old games it's what i do, although i didn't do it with a second drive i just partitioned some of my drive and done it that way, but it would work for you also, that's if you dont have any success in installing the game on the second drive, it's just something to try.

 

[Nodsu]

"Refuses to install" means what?

Have you tried the compatibility options XP offers you? How about the Windows XP compatibility tools offering you even more detailed tweaks?

And if those games are for Windows 95 or newer then you can use any filesystem you want to run them - the game cannot possibly know or care about what filesystem you are using.

 

[Darth_Terra1]

I was told by microsoft tech support when i was trying to get something to work with Xp that it wasn't NT compatible therefore as i was using XP and NTFS it will not install as it needed fat32, maybe the guy was lying and didn't know the true answer but it's what he told me, hence why i mentioned it to ve6tp