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I have a question about Microsoft Windows Virtual PC program. Why do some people call it the nuclear option to get programs written before Windows 7 and Vista to run on Windows 7 and Vista ?
Posts : 6934 Joined: 4 MAY 2004 Location: US, Texas
Status : Offline
I believe in Win7 the MS virtual PC is redundant. As for getting older games to run--that is another beast-and generally IS NOT related to wether or not your running the game on the right Kernel (9x, NT, etc) In XP compatability mode used what we internally called shims to allow compatability. Works okay if the game is in the list...not so much if it is not. In Windows 7 your actually running the Kernel the game was written to--or in short XP compatability mode runs the NT kernel-98 compatability mod runs the 9x kernel---and so on....great and much better for compatability. Saying that your game still might not work---and it IS NOT a windows issue. The problem started by devs ignoring the rules of the windows SDK and replacing system .dlls with the game. In win 95 and win 98 what this did was break other programs that depend on that .dll and eventually having the gamer ending up with an OS of NOT windows files but a collection of ad-hoc .dlls installed by every game programming bozo on the planet...and caused the routine of FDISK and reinstall of the OS anually, or even more often. This was essentially stopped in Windows ME and every OS that has followed. What happens is this. Windows will allow the game to install so the process doesn't freeze---but afterwards if there are replaced system .dlls windows will replace them with the originals... result---Windows no longer needs to be reinstalled periodically, no game install breaks 15 other programs....but...that poorly coded game will not run. Sorry, but the virtual PC thing won't allow you to break SDK rules either. Add to this hardware itself is not totally compliant in some cases...as an example NVidea 8800 gts cards--- If people in the industry read and followed the rules I wouldn't have to write this...but that is how it is, but at least I can make it clear it's not necessarily Bill gates as the turd on this sandwich.
