Too Old, Too New

One of the great things about operating systems like Windows is that, in its role as an abstraction of the hardware and other fundamental tasks, with an emphasis on backwards compatibility, you don’t have to care too much about specific versions of the OS. Write code that works on Windows 95, and it should work on future versions of Windows forevermore, right?

Well, maybe…

I have a large number of older games that I haven’t finished yet, and I recently had a hankering to play one of them in particular, an old racing game from 1997 called Pod. So, just throw the CD in, install it, and play, right?

Well, it *almost* installed… It managed to copy all of the files, but then failed with some slightly-garbled message about Indeo video drivers. It looks like the Indeo codecs are no longer included with XP, so it was trying to install them but failing, since the method of installing codecs has probably changed since the old Win95 days. I found a separate package containing the codecs over here and used those, retried the install, and this time it completed successfully. Huzzah!

Now all I had to do was run the game…which then immediately told me that I don’t have enough free disk space, despite having at least 24 gigs available. Considering that it was written back when 10 gigs would have been considered a huge drive, I suspect it simply wasn’t handling current large drive sizes properly. I managed to find a file under POD2_0/Instdata/Ubi.ins with a section named something like [SPACE_REQUIRED], and changing the value there to zero made the error go away.

Except then it just hung there with a big, blank window. It was then that I remembered that there were a handful of patches to apply as well, and fortunately I’d held on to them, since I’m not sure I’d even be able to find them online very easily anymore. However, applying the patches made things worse — trying to start the game afterwards made it complain about a missing executable, and after checking the install directory, all of the game’s executables were indeed missing. Sigh. After a couple rounds of uninstalling, reinstalling, repatching, and rechecking, I found which patch was causing the trouble and left it out the next time around.

But the big, blank window persisted. Then I remembered the application compatibility toolkit, which is specifically for running older programs under XP, and started it up. After selecting the game’s executable and Windows 95 mode, I then finally got the initial dialog I had been expecting. And then the intro video. And then the main menu! Except it wasn’t animating properly. And then a few seconds later I got dumped back at a big, blank window…

I’m not sure where else to go from here, but I don’t have the time to keep fiddling with it anyway. Fortunately, not all games are this problematic. I also tried some other older games like Master of Orion 2, WH40K: Final Liberation, and Planescape: Torment, and they all work just fine (aside from one small .ini edit required for FL).

Ideally I’d just keep an older system working just for ‘retro-gaming’ and run DOS 6/Win98 on it and then things should work just fine, but my oldest working box is already busy as my file server. Oh well, maybe in one of the next hardware reshuffles…