3 ms·
No, not really. Even if you ignore DRM which practically makes ALL games from the XP-Vista era unplayable (which I ignore since that is often not better in Wine
by AshamedCaptain 2y ago
No, not really. Even if you ignore DRM which practically makes ALL games from the XP-Vista era unplayable (which I ignore since that is often not better in Wine), just search around for the amount of workarounds that are required even when you apply these patches.
- babypuncher 2y agoI wasn't saying that fewer games from the '00s require fixes, I said that the things that are broken in them are more often caused by factors other than Windows itself. The most common compatibility issues I see with games from this era are caused by changes made to GPUs and/or their accompanying drivers. Take for example the first two Splinter Cell games. Certain shadows on them do not render on modern GPUs. The root cause isn't any changes Microsoft made to DirectX or Windows, but Nvidia deprecating a feature they relied on in their GPUs and their drivers not providing any kind of fallback. If you play these games on Windows XP with hardware from 2003, they run fine. But if you play them on Windows XP with hardware from 2007, they do not. Wine fixes a lot of these games because it is already providing its own translation layer for graphics calls, and any GPU vendor-specific DirectX stuff gets translated into hardware-agnostic Vulkan. These same games are often easy to fix on Windows using DXVK (Wine's DirectX translation layer), or wrappers designed for late '90s and '00s games like dgvoodoo2. The big elephant in the room is DRM, with popular solutions like StarForce being deliberately broken by Microsoft.