Old Games & Dual Booting

[CruRhone]

Some of the old classic games are frankly a pain to try and play. When you've had to practically re-build your PC just to get Thief Gold to play, the fun is kind of gone.

2 questions.

1. Will XP (and Win 98??) run on newer chipsets, GPU and double figure RAM, in a dual/multi boot setup?

2. Which is the best booter for a multi system OS?

Before anyone suggests it, I find the XP emulator to be pretty twitchy when gaming. Prefer multi-boot solution.

Thanks all.

[rojimboo]

1. XP-64bit will use more than 3gb ram, but you might have compatibility issues (arguably the reason you are doing this in the first place) and difficulty finding drivers. 3gb ram should be more than enough for most old games though. As for mobo, GPU etc. it will largely depend on drivers. If you find, or already have XP drivers for all, just go for it.

2. EasyBCD is quite good, if you are planning just a Windows 7 + XP dual boot. It's like a windows bootloader gui and wizard, made simpler.

And I fully empathise with your situation xd - I had a dual boot to XP from 7 just because of one single game, Gothic 3. The hardware accelerated sound on 7 would glitch the graphics, and as it was only a DX9 game, I only gained by playing it on XP-64bit. That game did require more RAM than 3gb though. After I got Dolby Surround headphones, the need for XP went away and I got rid of it. Easy with EasyBCD.

Edit: Just in case, remember to create a Win7/8 System Repair Disc before all this. You never know, eh?

http://pcsupport.about.com/od/windows7/ht/system-repair-disc-windows-7.htm

[CruRhone]

Thanks for this. There are some epic games out there (even back to Win95 believe it or not) that being a nostalgic geriatric old man, I find that I have the urge to play.

I think that what I will do is dual boot my old gear as a DOS based PC for non-NT OS and XP. My new PC, I won't muck about with.

Shame that the stuff that Uncle Bill brings out is never backwards compatible. You would have thought he was rich enough without making us buy new versions of software because his new stuff won't play it.

Oh yeah, I forgot, he needs my money to save the planet.