I saw the new Escape Goat 2 release and decided it was time to play the first Escape Goat
game that has been on my shelf for months.
The Game Card specs are:
Minimum system requirements: Windows XP / Vista / 7 / 8,
1.8 GHz Processor, 1GB RAM, 3D graphics card compatible
with DirectX 9, 100MB HDD, Mouse, Keyboard.

My laptop meets all of these requirements easily.
It's a Toshiba, quite a few years old, with an ATI Mobility 9000 graphics card and Windows XP SP2.
1.5GB RAM, 3.2GHZ Pentium4, DirectX 9.0c.

Trying to run the game it told me I needed .NET 4.0 so I installed it.
Still wouldn't run so I un/re-installed the game.
Now it tells me I need support for the XNA Framework Reach profile, whatever that is.

How does one guess what will and will not run on older machines just from the game card info?
Any help here would be welcome.

PS: The 30 day warranty ran out long ago. :)

Edit: Info and spelling.
Edit: The lappie runs Torchlight and many such games beautifully.

Well, then I suggest you try to install the XNA Framework Redistributable.

Hardware requirements and software requirements are 2 different things.

Apparently, the ATI Mobility 9000 isn't fully DX9 compliant (or compatible, or whatever you want to call it).

It seems to be a DX8 GPU, according to Google.

Thanks, the 6 year old thing was due to a brain cramp on my part, I edited that.
I have quite a number of games that call for DX9 running just fine.
I will try your suggestion but SP3 is a very last resort, I hate it to pieces for the way it slows an otherwise good machine to a crawl.

I guess I'm looking more for a way to judge, by the game specs, what I can run and not.
Not necessarily a specific answer for Escape Goat. Running dxdiag gave me a clean bill of health so I 'assumed' that was it OK with DX9.0c as installed. :)

Edit: Spelling and grammar.

Yes, that definitely sounds like a hardware problem. It looks like Pidgeot hit the nail on the head. According to the page he linked your GPU only supports DirectX 8.1.

Those games probably aren't using any of the features new to DX9, or they have a fallback/disable them if your card doesn't support it.

There's no way around it for you - the GPU doesn't support it. Anything that claims to need DX9 is going to be a gamble for you, so either stay away or risk the game not working. DX9 dates back to 2004; anything released more than a few years after that is very unlikely to work. It was more of a general observation - you can't rely on newer things to work right without the latest Service Pack, and there are in fact things requiring SP3. I don't have this game, nor do I still have an XP machine.

So I learned that DXdiag lies and I just have to take a guess at what will run.
I'll mark Pidgeot's post as answer.
Thanks All! ;-) Understood, most times I've run into the SP3 issue the software will yell at me about it.
This time DXdiag lied to me, hence the confusion.
Thanks!

It's not lying - you have DX 9 installed, but that doesn't mean your GPU has DX9 support. Similarly, you can use a DX9 GPU on a Windows 7 machine, but you'll still be running DX11 on it, and that's what DXDiag will tell you.

I don't remember if DXDiag tells you the supported level anywhere - like I said, I don't have hardware this ancient anymore - but Wikipedia and other places on the internet has extensive information on graphics adapters, and you can at least see the device name and then look it up.

It's actually funny (dumb) I knew it only supported Pixel Shader 1.4, but never tied that to DX version support.
Oh well, I was a network geek, we didn't need no steenkin' fancy video cards! :)
Thanks for your help, learned something new today.