I want to buy a new pc with Windows 10 but not sure if I will run into problems playing old games.
I want to play the likes of B17 flyingfortress/Silent hunter 3/Rome total war and most of the early call of duty games.
Anyone play the likes of these games on a modern pc?
Thanks
Iâve not played those exact games but my experience is hit and miss. Sometimes they work and sometimes not. If they are bought on a platform like Steam then itâs a decent bet they will play ok.
Chances are that they will be unplayable.
The CPU and graphics processing unit (GPU) will be many more times faster than these games can handle. The sound will be warbled and screechy and torpedoes will fire and swim at supersonic speeds. I did this with Janeâs âi688 Attack Subâ decades ago and the sonar blast was screechy fast and torpedoes fired zipped across the screen. Also the new PCâs GPUâs resolution was so much better that the entire game was compacted into just a quarter of the screen so that it was unplayable; I could barely see the game as it was so small.
What took tens of minutes to play a mission will be over in seconds with the faster new PC processor speeds.
That is why consoles like the XBOX and Playstation are so popular because they can play older games and multiplayer with old and new consoles. However, consoles lack a keyboard and thus arenât well suited for PC simulations.
If the B-17 game is the one I think it is, the audio drivers are no longer available for it. I tried to reinstall my copy a few years back and was stopped by the lack of said drivers which I could not find even on the archive sites. I couldnât get it to work with the default drivers.
If you mean the (very) old Microprose game, it is available online here:
So yes, at least you can play. Not sure if you can save games though.
Iâm actually playing the Commandos saga, and the four runs in a Win10 64bits. But I had to run the .exe in Windows 95 compatibility. Graphics and sound are fine, the only bug I found is that if for some reason the game goes background, I canât retrieve it and I have to restart.
As Trisaw says, I also installed the Janeâs 688 and the Janeâs Fleet Command in a older Win7 32bits with a Quad-core processor, and I couldnât play
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Mine was the âMighty 8thâ version that was released in 2002. It didnât allow you to customize the nose art and it was closer to MS Flight Simulator in many ways.
The same goes for Photoshop. I bought Photoshop CS5 before Adobe made Photoshop a mandatory monthly or annual subscription software and the CS5âs resolution was so old and bad on newer PCs that it was unusable. The Photoshop CS5 wouldnât fill in the entire screen and many of the controls were locked out by the newer CPUs and GPUs.
I used to play PC games a long time ago, but stopped because the PC requirements to play the latest games just climb exponentially. I got sick and tired of having to upgrade the PCâs CPU, memory, and sound and graphics cards to play the latest games so I bought a console. I donât really miss the PC simulation games although console I admit are mostly FPS and role-playing games. I also bought an external drive for my console.
If you do play PC games, I highly recommend buying an external PC disk drive just to install games to avoid the game grinding away on your internal hard disk and causing disk failure, which happened to me a couple of times back before there were external drives. PC games are so memory intensive and software demanding that the PC gaming is a good way to overheat, corrupt, fragment, and crash your internal hard disk faster.
I havenât upgraded in six years; my GPU is seven years old. I havenât had any issues myself, but then I did build my PC so was able to decide which components went inside rather than let a company decide. Unless you buy a premium model youâll get the cheapest parts they can get away with. I only shut down my PC for cleaning maybe four times a year; the machine itself generally runs 24/7 unless I put it in sleep mode.
So I can at least verify drives will last five+ years of near-continual use.
European Air War stopped working once WinXP stopped being a thing due to video card drivers not supporting 8 bit graphics anymore although there are some workarounds apparently. Pacific Air War went the same way. Blitzkrieg I from Nival still works though. The Close Combat games stopped working for me around Windows 7.
Rome TW works fine for me, the early CoD should probably be OK. Good luck finding a new pc with a dvd drive though.
It really is hit and miss with modern machines. Best bet is to buy a period correct machine from a charity shop and use that for retro gaming. Buying old hardware to build a retro macine is getting expensive as there are now lots of 40 to 50 year olds trying to recreate the pcâs of their youth and prices are rising on the usual sites.
Good Old Games (GOG) has a lot of patched titles for download for people who do not have cd drives anymoreâŚ
Someone will eventually suggest VirtualBox or VMWare but they are hit and miss as well in the areas of sound and video.
I really regret not holding onto some of my older pcs.
P