I love having to hack a little bit to get a game running. (Once in a while, at least.) I remember trying to get SimCity 3000 Unlimited to run on my Windows XP

I love having to hack a little bit to get a game running. (Once in a while, at least.) I remember trying to get SimCity 3000 Unlimited to run on my Windows XP laptop. The laptop was 10 years old, and the game was even older, meant to run on Windows 98 if I remember right. The game refused to run in anything but 16 bit color mode, while 32 bit was the default on XP. I thought maybe I could fiddle with the compatibility options on the shortcut, but all it had was a checkbox to run in 8 bit mode. I could go into XP's graphics options and manually switch to 16 bit mode, but that would be annoying to do every time I wanted to play the game, and then undo it afterwards. I thought maybe I could write a batch script to do it, but Windows XP didn't have anything built in to change the color mode from the command line. Thankfully there's a program out there called QRes that does just that. I wrote a script that switched the color mode to 16 bit, ran SimCity, then waited for it to terminate before switching back to 32 bit. Setting that up was more fun that actually playing the game.