Whoever complains about the current state of PC gaming can go and try to get Ultima VII running in a native Dos enviroment. Or Win '95....

Tinkering with games is an exeption nowadays. Back then it was the norm.
I say so. 99% of GOGs and Steam games run on my PC without any problems.

Agreed - for me. With my degree and 25+ years of experience working and playing on PC's - no hassle at all.

But I have been coming to the conclusion recently that PC's aren't really consumer products. Speaking as the family de-facto tech-support they are no end of grief.

I used to think that it was just the older generation in the family who weren't up to speed on maintaining their machines. But it's not - the younger ones haven''t a clue either. And it is not their fault - you don't need a degree to work a washing machine or a TV and PC's get marketed as if they were little more than TV's - and its a lie.

Erm - I think have some issues showing.

Notebook hardware generally isn't designed for gaming and has a lot of DirectX backward compatibility issues.

You could try setting energy management to high performance, it'll probably not work but it's worth a try. Notebook processors have all kinds of functions to have them save power and sometimes that is conflicting with the working of the software.

Yes, and for processor I also mean your GPU.

I think you are thinking about Netbooks - this is an i7 with a GT 540M and 6GB.

P.S. NOX runs quite happily on my ASUS N130 Netbook.
Intel Atom 1./6GHz, Intel 945 Express.
Running on batteries.

This is starting to turn into a bash the helper topic.
I'm outta here and good luck getting your games to run.

I love whiskey, but I have had no problems with PC gaming compatibility in the past 20 years. This 'problem' is very surreal to me, but I'd love to help nevertheless.
This really amazes me though. What is it that can cause the error? I mean, most machines have a nvidia/ATI graphics card. What else can go wrong?

I had that problem with one of the King's Quest games, I think V, where the sound wouldn't work properly because of the speed of the computer.

I have problem with Constructor and American Conquest, the game run too fast. But it can be solved by switching to Windows ME compatibility mode. Another one is the classic Command and Conquer titles, barely playable after applying unofficial fan made patch. I guess OP problem might be related to Direct Draw.

I wish I could say that, but never in a million years could I. I'm always having to tweak something, change a mode, go into a control panel, what-have-you. It's simple stuff, but it IS a hassle compared to "put disc in, play."

Enter tablets. They are so simple to use, by default you can't even install anything on them besides the official Market (GooglePlay or AppStore).

But IF you have used PCs before and the charm of novelty for the tablet vanishes, you start getting annoyed by how restricted the usage of "tablet PCs" is. Starting from the fact that it is really designed to be used by one person only. Sure it makes it simpler that you don't have to "juggle" with different user accounts, but...

Anyways, as far as I'm concerned, I feel that my bicycle gives me more hassle than my PCs. For example, whenever I do some maintenance for it myself, I end up with some loose parts without any idea where they belong. I tried some simpler bicycle as well with only one gear, but it didn't work too good either, the chain kept coming out of the cog.


For the OP: sorry I can't help. Of the mentioned GOG games, I have tried only Baldur's Gate so far, and I had no issues whatsoever with it, no tinkering or anything as far as I can remember. I'm playing it on a laptop running Win7 64bit.

I have Nox and it works perfectly on my win 7, I never had to tinker with it. I hope you get it working, its a great game.

I want your PC. I have two desktop PCs - one WIndows 7/XP dual boot, one Windows 98 network-isolated, and a laptop running Windows XP, and I would say around 25% of my games refuse to run on at least one of the machines despite being in-spec. Around 2% of the games refuse to run on any of those three.

As for the rainbow colours issue with Fallout 2/Age of Empires and so on: I use this program under WIndows 7 and it is a beauty: http://blog.macuyiko.com/p/palettestealersuspender.html

Baldurs Gate and Age of Wonders work now without any major problems.

But it is really NOX and Cosscks that I want to be able to run. I tried some of the suggestions that you guys mentioned, without any success. I also installed older drivers.