Looking to run some Win 7 and earlier games?

I'm currently running Windows 10 and am looking to run some older programs, preferably via Windows 7. What's the easiest way to do this? Is there an easy-to-use emulator out there, or is this going to be rather complicated?

Phys251 said:

I'm currently running Windows 10 and am looking to run some older programs, preferably via Windows 7. What's the easiest way to do this? Is there an easy-to-use emulator out there, or is this going to be rather complicated?

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Install the game and tell Windows to run it under a previous Windows. Right click on the .exe, go to Properties and on one of the tabs it asks if you want to run this under a different environment, probably an emulator of sorts, provided right there by Windows. Click the drop down menu and choose Win7 environment.

Summerwind said:

Install the game and tell Windows to run it under a previous Windows. Right click on the .exe, go to Properties and on one of the tabs it asks if you want to run this under a different environment, probably an emulator of sorts, provided right there by Windows. Click the drop down menu and choose Win7 environment.

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Welcome back, long time no see.

countryboy said:

Welcome back, long time no see.

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Thanks. Glad to be back.

Summerwind said:

Install the game and tell Windows to run it under a previous Windows. Right click on the .exe, go to Properties and on one of the tabs it asks if you want to run this under a different environment, probably an emulator of sorts, provided right there by Windows. Click the drop down menu and choose Win7 environment.

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Didn't work. I'm not very good at this sort of thing. :/

Phys251 said:

Didn't work. I'm not very good at this sort of thing. :/

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Did you remember to Save/Apply or whatever your system is offering. I often forget that step and just close the dialog. Perhaps you did the same?

Phys251 said:

Didn't work. I'm not very good at this sort of thing. :/

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Your best bet is to do a google search such as "how to run xyz123 on windows 10". While the OS handles many older games just fine some need a good bit of tweaking. If you're trying to run something designed to run on XP or older you may need to use an application such as DOSBox.

Summerwind said:

Did you remember to Save/Apply or whatever your system is offering. I often forget that step and just close the dialog. Perhaps you did the same?

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Nope, it literally won't even start under the "test the program" option.

Lutherf said:

Your best bet is to do a google search such as "how to run xyz123 on windows 10". While the OS handles many older games just fine some need a good bit of tweaking. If you're trying to run something designed to run on XP or older you may need to use an application such as DOSBox.

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Hmm, DOSBox...that might be a little old for what I'm looking for. But yeah, you're right on "how to run xyz123."

Phys251 said:

Nope, it literally won't even start under the "test the program" option.



Hmm, DOSBox...that might be a little old for what I'm looking for. But yeah, you're right on "how to run xyz123."

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Sorry it didn't work. It doesn't always, but it's easily the best place to start.

Phys251 said:

Didn't work. I'm not very good at this sort of thing. :/

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It's not entirely your fault.

I'm a big fan of old games and I have quite the connection, even with the backwards compatibility feature, alot of games simply won't work.

Sometimes you can do really convoluted things to make it work, but even then it might not.

For example, one game (my favorite, Star Trek Elite Force) I had to cut the amount of cores I was using to 1, and severely limit the amount of RAM the system would utilize, restart, run backwards compatibility, still wouldn't work.

It's simply because these games were made long before 64 bit systems and multicore processors and so no matter what, they often will not run, even Fallout 3, a famous example, you have to cut your cores to 1 otherwise the game will not run.

I still try now and then and see if any new fix or solution comes up, a friend of mine said, basically buy a crap piece of laptop and rip an old operating system on it and make sure you never connect to the net and you can play all your old games no problem.

I ran into some Windows XP games that wouldn't run under Windows 10.

So I downloaded and installed VirtualbBox. This is a Virtual Machine manager. Using this, I created an XP VM, using the normal XP installation process, and then started that VM and installed the game on that XP VM. Ran just fine, although a little bit slower (but then, the machines now are so much faster than the machines back then).

If there is a Windows 7 specific game that you want to run, you can create a VM for Windows 7 as well.

One word of warning though, no DOS based games. Those won't work in this setup.