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Comment by andsoitis | Hacker News Reader

> There are a lot of games from the 90s and even the 00s that require jumping through a lot of hoops to run on Windows

What are some examples?

Pretty much all the Renderware based GTAs have issues these days that only community made patches can mitigate.

A recent example is that in San Andreas, the seaplane never spawns if you're running Windows 11 24H2 or newer. All of it due to a bug that's always been in the game, but only the recent changes in Windows caused it to show up. If anybody's interested, you can read the investigation on it here: https://cookieplmonster.github.io/2025/04/23/gta-san-andreas...

I remember seeing a thread about that bug here on HN a while ago, that was a fun read.

The last time I tried to run Tachyon: The Fringe was Windows 10, and it failed. IIRC I could launch it and play, but there was a non-zero chance that a FMV cutscene would cause it to freeze.

I see there are guides on Steam forums on how to get it to run under Windows 11 [0], and they are quite involved for someone not overly familiar with computers outside of gaming.

0: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=29344...

Lemmings Revolutions. Apparently to run in something else that is not Windows 95/98/Me requires some unofficial .EXE patch that you could download from some shady website. The file is now nowehre to be found.

It's a great game, unfortunately right now I am not able to play it anymore :( even though I have the original CD.

Unfortunately, Wine is of no help here :(

Also original Commandos games.

Anything around DirectX 10 and older has issues with Windows, these days.

One more popular example is Grid 2, another is Morrowind. Both crash on launch, unless you tweak a lot of things, and even then it won't always succeed.

Need for Speed II: SE is "platinum" on Wine, and pretty much unable to be run at all on Windows 11.

Isn’t this because the wine db has those tweaks pre configured?

Windows used to be half operating system, half preconfigured compatibility tweaks for all kinds of applications. That's how it kept its backwards compatibility.

More a case of DirectX radically changing how it worked [0].

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/direct3darti...

It's because wine OS selector actually tries to match bug for bug the OS version you set but Window's one gave up after Windows 7.

Sidenote:

Whilst Morrowind is fine under Wine, there's a fantastic engine rebuild called OpenMW [0]. It runs on both Windows and Linux natively.

Some of the memory limits are also lifted, which meant I have a few mods that weren't possible without hacks in the past [1].

[0] https://openmw.org/

[1] https://morromod.netlify.app/

Unfortunately the modding community is split because OpenMW only cares about supporting the original game and not the script extender ecosystem that modders have built around it.

Red Alert 2. Then there's games like Dark Forces II that work but don't work with hardware rendering out of the box so they look like crap. I've also had games like Grid complain I didn't have enough VRAM (because I had more than 2GB), games that were tricky to get working because I used a 4K monitor (Sims 2, Crysis 2). And there's games where the original release is borked but a newer version on GoG is okay like Alpha Centauri.

slightly off the main topic, but if you wanna run dark forces II with gpu acceleration and texture filtering etc, try out OpenJKDF2

i got this working on my linux install (on risc-v nonetheless!) with a compile and some small tweaks it works well (getting 100+fps with filtering and ssao etc)

[0] https://github.com/shinyquagsire23/OpenJKDF2

I remember not getting Close Combat 2 (from 1997) running on Windows 10 some years ago but I did getting it running under Wine, albeit with some tweaks.

Whether that was a Windows compatibility issue or potentially some display driver thing, I'm not sure. (90's Windows games may have used some DirectDraw features that just don't get that much attention nowadays, which I think may have been the issue, but my memory's a bit spotty.)

Anything written with SafeDisk DRM e.g. medal of honor allied assault.

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