Why old games perform bad on modern OS?

[oddech_wymarlych_swiatow]

Because they were made for Win 3.11/95/98/XP etc. it's obvious but it doesn't explain anything.

Why low-end Pentium gaem like WizGold can do 100% CPU usage of almost 2 Ghz processor when run on Windows XP?
Is it emulated or something?

Why dual core PC with 3 Ghz RAM isn't able to reach decent framerate with Shogo, title that was playable on Pentium 166 MMX?

What is the sole reason of Wine being able to run better Windows 98 gaem than Windows 7/8/10?

My question is of pure technological nature.

 

[Excidium II]

Because different things are different and windows api clusterfuck. Old software in particular were full of hacks that naturally won't work as intended when the stuff they call changes on a new windows release.

As for wine, I dunno. Might just be that since it's a wrapper that makes stuff think they are accessing windows functions, it just works because it has to adapt what things do anyway. Also every software on Wine seems to have its own specific subset of hacks to make it work close to 100%.

 

[Mustawd]

There was an old gog version of Beyond Good and Evil that I used to play that would overheat my pc something fierce. Found this explanation:

There are some games that don't have any built-in framerate limitations, so your graphics card will always work in overdrive to provide as many frames as possible, which can cause overheating. For those games, the better your card is the faster it overheats. Since Vsync limits your framerate, it can solve the problem.

So the game was meant to be played on older pcs with leas advanced hardware back in its day.

 

[pippin]

Software might be an issue too since Directx changes its syntax from time to time, or so I've been told, and that's why some people reccomend to install older versions of Directx to make late 90s early 00s games run more smoothly.

I'm just happy we have dosbox and abandonware sites. Sometimes all you need is to play Commander Keen again.

 

[Forest Dweller]

There was an old gog version of Beyond Good and Evil that I used to play that would overheat my pc something fierce. Found this explanation:

There are some games that don't have any built-in framerate limitations, so your graphics card will always work in overdrive to provide as many frames as possible, which can cause overheating. For those games, the better your card is the faster it overheats. Since Vsync limits your framerate, it can solve the problem.

So the game was meant to be played on older pcs with leas advanced hardware back in its day.

So you were running - what, 300 fps or something like that?

 

[Mustawd]

Over 9000

 

[:Flash:]

Because they were made for Win 3.11/95/98/XP etc. it's obvious but it doesn't explain anything.

Why low-end Pentium gaem like WizGold can do 100% CPU usage of almost 2 Ghz processor when run on Windows XP?
Is it emulated or something?

In the days of DOS, which was a single-threaded operating system, every program was meant to use 100% of the CPU (because why wouldn't you want to use all the power your computer could provide?). The programs were written to be executed without interference from the operating system, so the CPU just executed them as fast as it could.
This led to the well known phenomenon of older games running way too fast on newer PCs.
So developers started putting in methods to decouple the game speed from the CPU speed. Depending on the method, the game would still use 100%CPU just run at an acceptable speed.
When Windows 95 came around it (being a multi-threading OS) expected developers to program in such a way as to not use 100% of the CPU. But a lot of developers just kept their old habits and paid as little attention to the OS as possible and still programmed their game in a way that used 100% CPU. That is also one of the reasons alt-tabbing out of a game (or accidentally hitting the windows key) was a real problem in those days, often resulting in the game crashing or producing strange sound.
On modern PCs those games shouldn't use 100% CPU though, just one core.

What is the sole reason of Wine being able to run better Windows 98 gaem than Windows 7/8/10?

I don't know, but as both Wine and later Windows are just emulating some aspects of earlier Windows, it might be that the emulation of Wine is just betting for specific things.

 

[Dzupakazul]

I remember that my very first computer, in the late nineties, was a 486mhz machine with a button that deliberately slowed down its cycles once pressed. It was the only way to play a fairly obscure PC Ducktales game ["A Guest for Gold" was the subtitle, if I recall], which was basically a collection of minigames. Each of them was a clusterfuck without the slowdown - on the almighty almost-Pentium-1-hardware, the cavern segment where you had to latch a rope onto platforms and climb up was impossible because you spun the rope and released it at the right timing, which is hella difficult when that prick, Dewey, spins it with enough energy to boil water. In a different minigame that was a semi-cyoa romp through a different kind of cavern, you had a mummy chasing you in real time as you picked your path. Again, the mummy owned you if you played on normal settings.

I don't know how common this function is/was in computers, nor can I imagine an use for it outside of video games - after all, I figure that, for work, if you're calculating something, it'd behoove you to have it done as fast as possible.

 

[Absinthe]

That does sound like a late 90s computer. That button is called the turbo button (even though it slows the CPU down) for some insane reason. It was already being phased out in the 486 era though. A lot of games back in the day made assumptions about CPU speed and framerates to run smoothly, so if you put it on newer hardware it just runs at 100% and crashes or becomes unplayable. The turbo button was how you fixed it back in the day. Now you have DOSBox.

The reason why WINE works better than a newer version of Windows is probably because the Windows and DirectX API and features change over time, and the WINE team actually puts in more effort for backwards compatibility than MS Windows itself. Once Windows switched from 98 (and the short-lived Me - Millennium Edition) to Windows Xp, the underlying OS core changed massively and running old software meant that your Windows Xp was just emulating Win98 behavior to get old software working, and it wasn't emulating that well, plus Microsoft stopped caring about supporting decades old software. WINE's entire goal on the other hand is to obtain full compatibility with Windows software, plus WINE uses specialized software hacks to get certain programs running right, and a lot of WINE setups for old programs even go through the bother of installing the actual Microsoft DLLs from back then into your WINE setup for that specific program so it runs right. Microsoft Windows on the other hand often needs you to run the latest DLLs which are no longer fully compatible with old software.

 

[Severian Silk]

That does sound like a late 90s computer. That button is called the turbo button (even though it slows the CPU down) for some insane reason.

Holy shit I always used that because I thought it did the exact opposite!!

 

[Sensuki]

There was an old gog version of Beyond Good and Evil that I used to play that would overheat my pc something fierce. Found this explanation:

There are some games that don't have any built-in framerate limitations, so your graphics card will always work in overdrive to provide as many frames as possible, which can cause overheating. For those games, the better your card is the faster it overheats. Since Vsync limits your framerate, it can solve the problem.

So the game was meant to be played on older pcs with leas advanced hardware back in its day.

I see devs often use this as an excuse, but it's kinda bullshit. Starcraft 2 making your GPU work as hard as possible had nothing to do with frame rate, but rather other things/sec.

Whereas, In Call of Duty 2 we used to play between 250-333 FPS back in 2007 and I never heard of anyone having an overheating issue. Some people could run a bare level at 999FPS and it still wouldn't use that much GPU.

 

[sser]

That does sound like a late 90s computer. That button is called the turbo button (even though it slows the CPU down) for some insane reason.

Holy shit I always used that because I thought it did the exact opposite!!

Gotta push it twice.

 

[:Flash:]

That does sound like a late 90s computer. That button is called the turbo button (even though it slows the CPU down) for some insane reason.

Holy shit I always used that because I thought it did the exact opposite!!

On all computers I know from the area, the CPU ran at normal speed when the button was active (i.e. pressed and/or the LED lit), and at decreased speed when the button was inactive / LED off.

I remember when I got a Pentium I took it back to the store and complained that the Turbo button does not work, thinking the PC would be slowed down all the time if the LED isn't lit. The guy at the store started to take the computer apart and try all kind of things to make the Turbo button work. Only after about an hour he asked a colleague, who said "Turbo buttons never work on Pentiums, you can't slow them down. It's only there for 4/86 motherboards". I think he was correct, I never saw a working Turbo button on a Pentium.
My old 4/86 has a LED 7-segment display that shows the current CPU speed and is reduced if you depress the Turbo button.

 

[Konjad]

That button is called the turbo button (even though it slows the CPU down) for some insane reason.

Seriously?! For fuck's sake, back in the day I always assumed "Turbo Button" overclocks CPU and I run it always all the time thinking it made my PC run slightly faster

 

[Fowyr]

Some 80286 had Turbo setting inside BIOS. Ami, I think.

This led to the well known phenomenon of older games running way too fast on newer PCs.

It was especially common to games made in 80s where programmers often used just empty cycles instead of wait(time) functions. Of course, on the fast machines these empty cycles were executed almost instantly.

That "error 200" bug was due to Pascal CRT module that made division by 0 on the fast machines when initialized.
You could just add "Uses Crt" in the start of program - and voila. Irony adds fact that error was in the wait() function.

 

[Lostpleb]

Because everything modern is shit especially if we consider that Windows XP still does certain things better than Windows 8.

 

[A user named cat]

There was an old gog version of Beyond Good and Evil that I used to play that would overheat my pc something fierce. Found this explanation:

There are some games that don't have any built-in framerate limitations, so your graphics card will always work in overdrive to provide as many frames as possible, which can cause overheating. For those games, the better your card is the faster it overheats. Since Vsync limits your framerate, it can solve the problem.

So the game was meant to be played on older pcs with leas advanced hardware back in its day.

Instead of vsync and possibly introducing input lag or something similar, plus certain games not supporting vsync altogether even if driver-forced, you can just use a hard frame limiter to remedy that issue. MSI Afterburner has one that works very good. Latest AMD drivers also have a frame limit control setting, Nvidia likely does as well.

 

[Konjad]

Because everything modern is shit especially if we consider that Windows XP still does certain things better than Windows 8.

modern OSes based on linux are way ahead of what they were at any point in the past (or what windows was). no thanks, i wouldn't go back

 

[oddech_wymarlych_swiatow]

In the days of DOS, which was a single-threaded operating system, every program was meant to use 100% of the CPU (because why wouldn't you want to use all the power your computer could provide?). The programs were written to be executed without interference from the operating system, so the CPU just executed them as fast as it could.

Is there a way to prevent it via Wine?

I feel bad for something like Torment, Dark Reign or Nestorm with laughable system reqiurements make my 2 Ghz processor go apeshit.

 

[:Flash:]

In the days of DOS, which was a single-threaded operating system, every program was meant to use 100% of the CPU (because why wouldn't you want to use all the power your computer could provide?). The programs were written to be executed without interference from the operating system, so the CPU just executed them as fast as it could.

Is there a way to prevent it via Wine?

I feel bad for something like Torment, Dark Reign or Nestorm with laughable system reqiurements make my 2 Ghz processor go apeshit.

I don't know about Wine (never used it). If you can't use VSync with the game, VirtualBox allows setting the virtual PC to use only a percentage of the host PC's CPU. Another workaround would be to force your CPU to run in energy save mode.