I finally got in the mood to try and finish my migration from XP to Vista, and spent a lot of the last couple days installing a whole whack of my older games under it, with less trouble than I expected. The ones that failed to work well enough or at all (Spellcross, Blade Runner, Star Control 3, Chaos Gate) were mostly ones that I remember having trouble with under XP as well, and I might be able to get them working under DOSBox instead.

One little ‘trick’ I tried for helping the older games was to create a separate directory for them (e.g., c:\old) and setting the permissions on it so that I had full control over it and all subdirs. Games can then create their own save/config/etc. files in their install directory without needing admin rights or dragging in the VirtualStore confusion.

There were still various glitches and minor problems, but they were mostly solvable. Some games needed to be patched up manually before they would run at all (Diablo 2 LoD, Riddick). Titan Quest: Immortal Throne had to be run as admin the first time for the update of the original game files, but could run as a regular user after that. Freedom Force had no sound within missions, until I noticed that it had selected the DirectX Hardware Accelerated sound provider by default, and switching it to the software emulation provider fixed that. Worms: Armageddon initially crashed when a round started, but that was fixed by a beta patch found after digging through some forums. And a couple others would seem to run fine as a regular user, but wouldn’t save your preferences unless run as admin (Raven Shield, probably a couple others I’m forgetting).

StarForce was a bit of a pain when it came time to install GT Legends, but it eventually worked. I had to let it install the included drivers, reboot, let Vista whine about an incompatibility while getting the update from the SF site, installing that, and rebooting again. Attempting to install the update before running the game doesn’t work, it seems.

And in one final surprise, I had never gotten Incubation to work very well under XP due to stuttery performance making it impossible to control, but it’s perfectly fine under Vista.

I’ve only given each one a few minutes of testing though, so maybe there are still mid-game crashes awaiting, but they seem to run fine for now at least. My little trick might not really be worth it in the end; may as well just tag them all as admin and with the appropriate compatibility mode, since it doesn’t really hurt.