Examining the Decline of PC Game Collecting (& the PC game industry as well)

[Greg2600]

I have no issue 'finding' a copy of XP, it's long dead and it would hurt no one at this point. I'm just wondering what kind of overhead emulating another PC within a PC running XP on that to get things done would be on my laptop.

Well I think most people are emulating Windows 95 or 98, not XP, since you can do XP compatibility in Windows 7.

[Rickstilwell1]

Well I think most people are emulating Windows 95 or 98, not XP, since you can do XP compatibility in Windows 7.

You can't do XP mode in all versions of Windows 7. Home Premium doesn't have it. You have to have Professional or better. That means most PC's stock installation of Windows when bought new at a store in those days where they carried 7 instead of 8 won't do it.

[Greg2600]

You can't do XP mode in all versions of Windows 7. Home Premium doesn't have it. You have to have Professional or better. That means most PC's stock installation of Windows when bought new at a store in those days where they carried 7 instead of 8 won't do it.

My PC has XP compatibility in all application/shortcut properties, and it's Win 7 Home Premium.

[Tanooki]

I'm with Rick on that, mine is a stock install from ASUS and it has no XP mode, it needs Professional which was like as someone said $150 or so more than the default so that's what I got, basic.

[Jorpho]

it needs Professional which was like as someone said $150 or so more than the default

No, that is NOT what I said. A BRAND NEW copy of Professional costs $150. When I bought my PC a few years ago (a Dell, to be precise), the option of getting Professional cost $50 more than the default.

And XP mode is completely different from running a program with compatibility mode. XP mode consists of an entirely separate virtual machine running its own copy of Windows XP. Compatibility mode is just Windows 7 attempting to fake it. And actually, there is considerable effort put into compatibility mode; Windows 95 compatibility mode actually contains a giant chunk of the old Windows 95 code. (Mr. Chen has lots of interesting articles like that; see also this, for instance.) However, there is no way compatibility mode is ever going to run 16-bit applications.

[Greg2600]

Ah that's true. I'm sure there's free virtual machine software available. As I said metal Jesus used something like that in his video.

[Tanooki]

I'm saying with my options $150 would have been it and then grabbing all the drivers off their website and manually loading what I needed as if I ran the backup on the shadow drive on here for restorations would have wiped it back to stock.

As far as running other shells it's just too complicated for me to even bother and I don't have another copy of an os either to even attempt it. I'm sure my i5-2410M chip and 6GB of ram would be more than enough to run some DOS/9X era crap easily but it's just more work than it is worth when I got a wall of around 300 games ranging from the early/mid 80s to current where more than 1/2 of it is 8/16bit stuff.

[LINK398]

Yes it seems less and less games get a release on the PC one of the main reasons is it easier to copy and distribute the game and also consoles have a lot more market share than they did. A lot of PC exclusive genres are also available on consoles.