Maximum PC

So I've been feeling nostalgic, so I wanted to give some of my old games a run. I tried installing Thief 1, King's quest, mask of eternity, myst, and starcraft on my win 7 x64 machine. None of them worked. at all. I then tried to install them on the XP mode virtual machine I have. Still nothing.
I got them all to install, eventually, but they all crash on loading, or the colors are really screwed up, or yada yada. I've looked especially hard into troubleshooting thief, and can't get anythign to work. What do I do?

Nvidia 285, core i7 920, 6 gigs of ram. I think my drivers are up to date, but I'm sure if I check I'll be one release behind in my video card or something...

Right click it, properties, and then compatibility. Set it to something on the list and see if it works.

or maybe install FreeDOS

http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/f ... =Main_Page

I use that on Linux and was able to play my very first CD ROM game from 1994 -- Days of the Tentacles !

compatibility mode seems to work for most programs, but never games...

If its a DOS app, try DOSBox. I'm also suprised that Starcraft doesn't work. Google the games and Windows 7, surly there will be someone with your same issues.

my biggest issue is that all the articles i find are at least a year old or more, and they are using different hard ware than me (like 6000, 7000, or 8000 series video cards) and they always say that the video drivers are the biggest problem...
Can I install really really old drivers onto my 285? Taht sounds like a terrible idea.

Weird, I'm finding just changing some settings around. You shouldn't need to roll back drivers to get things to work.

If the video is screwed up, did you try to go into video properties and set the color quality to 16 bit and the resolution to 480 by 640 and run the game?

Did you right click on the .exe of the game and set it to run in win95 or win98 compatibility mode?

Nasty

Starcraft? I play Starcraft daily on multiple Win7 machines and it works fine.

Some games under Windows will not
run under a duel processor envornment,

Solution:

Sometimes this problem is fixed by
assigning only one CPU to the game.
To do this, launch the game, and before
starting a the game (while in the menu)
hit CTRL+ALT+DEL and select "Task Manager".
In "Applications" select your game,
right click on it and select
"Goto Process", right click on the process
and select "Set Affinity". Here you are
able to set whatever CPUs you want to the
game. Select only a
single CPU to run the process, and apply
the new settings. Return to your game and
try the game again, the symptoms of running
Duel CPUs should dissapear. Hope this helps

Seconded. Starcraft DOES play nicely on Windows 7, but on 1080p the graphics look a bit stretched out. Starcraft's opening/loading screen and menus did look like it was in 32-bit color, but then it worked when i started a campaign and then on consecutive program openings.

i have an i7-920, 6GB of ram, and a Radeon HD4890.

I play starcraft on several windows 7 machines and I have yet to have any issue with it.

I believe sc was 8 bit.

colors or code?