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Comment by laurentdc | Hacker News Reader

All this is fascinating though. We're talking 18+ years of binary compatibility.

Microsoft sure knows how to keep the cash flowing.

Uuuuhhhh. There are plenty of games that came out even 10 years ago that ostensibly have the "Designed for Windows XP" (even Vista) badges but that which refuse to run on Windows 10. Often it's to do with how they do graphics, which is a shame, because sandboxing like this is a great way to allow graphics to be shimmed.

Also sometimes because it uses SafeDisc or Securom copy protection, which just won't work on Windows 10: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/08/17/windows-10-safed...

Why can't the studies simply release an official "no-CD" patch to solve this problem? If the really don't have the source code anybody, just ask politely at the scene. ;-)

GoG sometimes does that for retro titles.

gog sometimes ships with official scene no-cd release exe's

If it's 'official', it needs to be tested and supported. Why throw money at a years-expired project for a handful of users who won't pay you?

Because if your game does not work on modern OSs because of the DRM that you used can easily become a marketing disaster.

How many studios or publishers are still in business under the same name? And how many gamers would actually care? Even in the worst days of Ubisoft's "add DRM until it doesn't work for 50% of legitimate users" approach people still bought their games.

There are many older games that still have an avid fanbase (which can imply potential for a shitstorm).

StarCraft is the exception that proves the rule, and Blizzard did actually release an official no-CD patch. Other than that, what games, and what company would they impact? E.g. my friends still play Total Annihilation, but the company that published it went bankrupt years ago; Gas Powered Games might theoretically be affected by their reputation but they probably don't have the rights to release a patch for Total Annihilation even if they wanted to.

"has to do with" usually means "undocumented hacks". Perhaps MS could have done more to discourage or even break these kinds of apps early rather than letting them linger and become popular.

Games have always suffered the most from back-compat, usually because they were the ones most prone to using hacks to speed things up. Remember how many things stopped working during the XP migration, because they expected the OS to get out of their way, like 9x did?

FWIW, there are some counterexamples. There is a turn-based strategy game (think Master of Magic meets H&MM) called Age of Wonders, that originally shipped in 1999, targeting Win95/98 and WinNT 4.0 - a rare case, that, most games from that era didn't even bother with NT. I still play it regularly, and the amazing part is how it not just works on Win10 machines today, but works amazingly well. For example, it can handle pretty much any random resolution (including tablets in portrait mode and other weird corner cases), and it actually scales its UI up and down accordingly.

The most interesting part is that it does do things that were normal back then but which are no-no now, like putting savegames directly into its install folder, or saving settings under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. But because they did them in a straighforward, non-hackish way, things like Vista's and later registry and FS redirection all work great, and the game doesn't even notice it at all.

I bet it could be easily packaged into the Store, if they wanted to.

> targeting Win95/98 and WinNT 4.0 - a rare case, that, most games from that era didn't even bother with NT. I still play it regularly, and the amazing part is how it not just works on Win10 machines today, but works amazingly well

These two things are not unrelated. Windows from 2k onwards has been based on the NT line (I remember Windows 7 is internally NT 6.1, I imagine 10 is similar).

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