A nice little follow-up kinda-thing to my "adventure games, dammit!" thread.

Anyone know if I can play ANYthing on WinME? I just upgraded from Win98, and it's supposed to be the same thing, but now my cd burner isn't working, Grim Fandango isn't working (I was halfway!!), and I'm afraid any ancient game I buy won't function. Know any more about this? grazi.

~Eva

First - WinME sucks the big one. Avoid it like the plague. With that said, a game like Grim should work under ME. The best advise I can give you is to "downgrade" to 98SE.

thats a little over doing it. Its not horrible, its just not good... at all. You can play every game you had on 98 with ME, however my advice is to stick with 98 for now.

Heh, I'll guarantee that a good chunk of DOS games that worked under 98 won't work under ME.

And don't even ask about sound in Sam and Max :D

i remember hearing there was a way to put on 2 versions of windows, and it would ask you which one you wanted to use when you started up.

i cant remember how to do it exacly, and im not very tech savvy, so i dont know, but i think you had to have 2 hard drives to do it.

The choice between Windows 98 and Windows 2000 at startup

1) Install Windows98 (or keep as it is)
2a) Get the Windows 2000 CD and install it.
2b) During the installation you can choose to keep Windows 98.
2c) When it is installed go to properties of this computer and somewhere you can choose if you wanna the OS choice activated in the startup and with what timelimit.

This works atleast if you have your harddrive split into two, or have more than one cause it is better to have W98 on one and W2000 on the other.
This works on Windows2000 Professional. It should work on the W2000 Standard also.

Note: After the installation, if you are in W2000 or W98 you gotta reboot to change OS.

WinME is quite bad with older games.
Plus it's not that steady, crashes often.
I recommend Win98. :)

http://www.samnmax.net) - if its up, go to Snuckey's I think it is, and it tells you how to get the sound working in everyones second favourite game, Sam n Max Hit the Road.

I used ME before I got XP and it was the most stable Windows I had ever used (Until I got XP.) Sure, it did crash, but not nearly as often as Win98. Also, games worked with no problem. It must be your pc or drivers since you can't even get GF to work.

Originally posted by Dalixam
I used ME before I got XP and it was the most stable Windows I had ever used (Until I got XP.) You musta had a different ME than what i had. My ME was about as stable as a rubber stilt-walker. Win 2000 is easily better and the compatibility upgrade means i can play any game i could before.

As far as i'm concerned 98 was better than ME

No, I have to agree with Dalixam; ME is FAR more stable on my system than the version of 98se that came pre-installed. If I see one blue screen a month or have to force a reboot once every other week, that's a lot. I have never understood the hatred towards this OS. I like it and am planning on waiting a long time before I attempt an upgrade to XP.
Granted, I took it upon myself to do some tweaking, but nothing that far out of the ordinary.
I have yet to find a game that doesn't run on it, but none of my games are all that old.

dammit, i knew it! my dad went on and on and on about WinME being so nice, exactly like Win98; he has it on his computer. The reason I had to toss Win98 was because my computer was *INCREDIBLY* messed up before I made the change. It would freeze up, shut down, and flood me with error messages that made no sense. I haven't had that problem w/WinME yet, but I can't play ANY friggin' game. poot.

So the problem is, I don't know if I can go back to Win98, in fear of the comp messing up again big time. How highly do we recommend Win2000? Or WinXP - I don't know much about that one. Where can I most likely play all my games??

~Eva

PS. Lucasarts should rerelease "Classics", cuz I can't play ANY of those any more. Makes me sad. :(

Win2000 is excellent and, with the compatibility patch will be able to play practically any game you could run on the 98/ME kernel. XP has no dos so i don't know what that will mean for much older games.

I've recently changed from ME to 2000 and it's been an immediate improvement, not a single crash, the whole thing is beutifully stable and doesn't clog up in the least.

2000 doesn't have DOS either. In fact, if you look at version numbers, 2k is NT 5.0 and XP is NT 5.1 which pretty much means that there isn't that much of a difference between them.

I would go with XP Pro over 2K at this point, since there isn't much difference, and that XP will be supported in the future and there's no guarantee that 2K will continue to be.
XP is supposed to be more "Home-user friendly" than 2000 as well. It does have a classic mode emulator that is supposed to run many 3.1/95/98/ME/DOS apps. There will be some that don't work, that's to be expected, but you can always set up dual-boot with 98 if you run into that.

sooooooooooooooo...I'm intrigued by this boot-option thingie. Would I need 2 separate hard drives to have both Win98 and WinXP installed? Or can I set it all up together? And does WinXP come with the emulator to work old Windows games? And how likely will those old games work...? I'm desperate here. ::cries:: :rolleyes: hehe

partion magic (http://www.powerquest.com/partitionmagic/)
I know XP has something like this built-in ( XP Multiboot (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/using/howto/gettingstarted/multiboot.asp) ), but you'll get more options with something like this.
I have never personally done it, so I will bow out to more experienced voices at this point.

I found this about XP compatability mode. (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/home/using/howto/gethelp/appcompat.asp)

Good luck with it.