Old PC, old games but new OS = no luck?
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I have an old PC. 2005-2007 approximately. Had XP on it, then Win7 with a RAM upgrade, then Win10. Now I'm trying to run the same games on it that I used to play back in the XP era but there is no Win10 driver for the Radeon X800 GTO card that's in it so none of them run. (Microsoft Basic Display Adapter is what it uses as a driver.)
Am I completely out of luck or is there a solution? I dunno, unofficial third-party drivers? Install the old drivers on WINE on Linux? (Or install a copy of XP on the other hard drive...)
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This guide on XDAdev looks promising.
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For USB devices at least you can install XP drivers in Windows Vista+ if you do it manually through Device Manager and click through a whole lot of "I understand what I'm doing" dialogs.
The same may be true of GPU drivers, although I've never tried it. If it is, the only challenge is to find either a download of the XP driver, or the original driver disk that shipped with the card. And also hope they have the driver files exposed or in a simple .zip archive without having to run an .exe installer to get at them.
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@hungrier or this one
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@timebandit Awesome tip.
It's a well-kept secret that Windows Vista didn't remove the old 2000/XP driver model, it's still buried in there somewhere. The key is to figure out how to install the driver.
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Both Windows Vista and Windows 7 can use display drivers for XP and 2000. They are called XPDM or WDM drivers. They are not compatible with DWM, the desktop composition and therefore do not support Aero and have problems like sharing a single framebuffer resulting in ghosting of windows when a program doesn't redraw itself.
From Windows 8, WDDM drivers are required. These are the drivers from Vista and later supporting desktop composition.
So, every driver using WDDM should work on Windows 10 on paper. In reality, drivers for Vista are prone to hangs, driver restarts and other weird glitches..
I know from experience with some laptops with Intel and Ati/AMD GPU's.
Also, to support WDDM, the card should at least be compatible with DirectX 9.
I have a laptop running Windows 7 with a XPDM driver just fine although without the fancy animations etc.
I could remember loading XPDM drivers on Vista and 7 is documented somewhere. Mayby I could find that.
Edit: Found it!
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And to install the driver, the trick is to use Device Manager, chosing for selecting the driver by hand and pointing it to the .INF file of the driver as @TimeBandit has pointed out.
Problem are those pesty installers saying that the OS isn't supported or other annoyances.
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@hungrier said in Old PC, old games but new OS = no luck?:
This guide on XDAdev looks promising.
let's see
9.Wait while it install Drivers
10.Enjoy Windows 8/8.1/10,Lot Fast,Lot Smooth
Much grammar
</snark>
I'll give it a try.
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@marczellm Go to AMD.com, click Drivers & Support, and in the Manually Select Your Driver select Desktop Graphics, Radeon X Series, Radeon X8xx Series, then choose either 32 or 64-bit Windows Vista for the OS and download the driver.
After downloading, run the installer, and let it extract the driver to C:\ATI\whatever. Afterwards, the actual driver installer will run, but it usually fails - don't worry, close it, go to Device Manager, right-click Microsoft Basic Display Adapter, choose Update driver and tell it to search in C:\ATI. You'll most likely get a question if you trust ATI to install the driver - do so, and the driver will install and work fine.
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Why do you need Win10 on this old computer? I presume you have something newer for your main pc, and this is just for nostalgic gaming. Y no Windows XP?
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@cartman82 said in Old PC, old games but new OS = no luck?:
Y no Windows XP?
Little sister's main PC for all internet use.
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This post is deleted!
