Running old school games

[Only old school]

All I play is old school.
I emulate everything on my laptop.
I can do from Atari (so could a watch) to NES SNES Sega N64 even Game Cube and PS2.
Stock laptop processor is
AMD A-6 5200 APU with Radeon Graphics at 2.00GHz
And I added Ram now at 8Gb

Other old games
roller coaster tycoon.
Age of empires
The list goes on

I've run this game on every possible version of Windows on countless computers.
Back it the day I had a Pentium III with maybe 512 MB of RAM no dedicated graphics

WHY IS IT HARDER TO RUN AS WINDOWS EVOLVES

IN 2020 I CANT PLAY CIV 3 SOOTHLY!!!!

I know it does mass calculating to generate all AI's moves and each coin and each shield is counted but FFS it should be a simple task for today's computer!!!!
So how smooth is your game?

 

[Jivilov]

Really. Fortunately Civ3 plays smoothly for me within a few turns after reloading a saved game. Likewise Camo Workshop's Steel Panthers games (WW2 and Main Battle Tank) are OK after installing outside the Programs folder. What especially ticks me off though is Microsoft Games' own Rise of Nations won't run at all on Windows 10. It won't even allow you to redirect installation to a different folder.

There was a "systems architect" who told me awhile back that every new OS would support every game or program that came before. Didn't happen.

 

[Quintillus]

For some reason Civ3 doesn't run smoothly on my newest laptop (2018; Windows 10; nVIDIA 1050M). You aren't the only one. Although to be fair, it also doesn't run smoothly on my Windows 98 desktop with 128 MB of RAM (now upgraded to 512) and a dedicated graphics card with 8 MB of VRAM. Everything in between runs smoothly - a Windows 8.1 desktop with AMD's RX 480 GPU, and a couple laptops running Windows XP (one nVIDIA; one ATi graphics).

I suspect that something in either Windows 10's graphics subsystem, or perhaps recent nVIDIA/AMD drivers, changed that caused something to become much more inefficient in some older games like Civ3. Haven't really dug into it though, since my Windows 8.1 computer is my main one (in no small part to avoid Windows 10 compatibility issues, as Windows 10 changes over time).

(That's assuming you are having laggy graphics. If it's just the AI turn time, the answer is easier. Civ3's AI is single-threaded, and while today's computers might be 40 times as fast as that Pentium III, for single-threaded tasks, they might only be 10 times as fast. And if the Pentium III took 3 minutes for a turn, that means you're still looking at 20 seconds today. And for large maps, 3 minutes for a Pentium III is not unheard of - I've timed a Pentium IV (2.66 GHz) as taking almost 5 minutes for a turn at peak complexity on a 180x180 map with 31 civs. The real culprit in this case is Firaxis not optimizing Civ enough for large maps to run smoothly)

 

[chrisbk88]

I've ran Windows 7 for a long time, since 2010. I've recently switched to WIndows 8.1 since the 7 support ends January 14th, 2020. One problem that I had on both OS's that I recently solved was the game was in a nonresponsive mode when I would press the button to end my turn. And I'd sit there unable to see the AI's moves. Not gamebreaking but super annoying. I fixed this issue today by changing the exe file to run in Windows XP compatibility mode.

The only other issues I can think of is adding KeepRes=1 to the conquest.ini file located in the conquest folder, and the intro when you open the game has always casued problems on modern OS's for some reason, and I recently found out you can add PlayIntro=0 to that same configuration file.

And as far as playing efficiently, turn off animations for everything except maybe battles (I keep off mostly), Only thing I animate is enemy moves, so you know anything with an animation is your enemy. Turn off show automatic moves.

Always build previous built unit so you never get asked for build orders for military. It would be really cool if Fraxis made a way that we didn't have to be notified of what was built in every city.

 

[tjs282]

Always build previous built unit so you never get asked for build orders for military. It would be really cool if Fraxis made a way that we didn't have to be notified of what was built in every city.

There is another option in the Preferences: "Always ask for build-orders after unit construction".

De-activating that, and activating "Always build previous unit" should cut down on the number of "What shall we build next?" pop-ups.

 

[vmxa]

I fire up Ascendancy, Alien Legacy, Moo, Mom and other old games from time to time.