can you play an old 16 bit game on a high end graphics card

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simplegamer23

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Apr 10, 2016
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Hello. I am buying a simple Windows XP gaming laptop soon. I want to play games on it like
Freddi Fish, Pajama Sam
Broken Sword 3 & 4
Syberia 1 & 2
The Longest Journey & Dreamfall: the Longest Journey, etc.
I am getting these games in the original cd rom version. Examples of some graphics cards are: Geforce GTX 550 Ti, AMD Radeon HD 7750 or 3870 etc.

My question is, can you play an old 16 bit cd rom game on an advanced graphics card or will I run into problems? Also, will I be able to play these games on the Quadro NVS 130M graphics card?
 
Solution
Eximo
16 bit applications cannot run on a 64bit OS. However, there are plenty of virtualization tools like DosBox for older titles. Some older titles have been reworked and are available through gog.com or Steam.

If you need an older Windows instance, tools like VirtualBox will let you have a guest OS. This would be virtualized hardware, so you are almost guaranteed compatibility, but not necessarily performance.

A lot of older games rely on VESA graphics, which is still a supported graphics standard on all GPUs. Even older titles 'software' render pretty much everything. A lot of IBM 100% compatible/ POSIX compliant games will run even in modern OS, they don't care as long as there is memory and CPU available to run.

I have had more luck...
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InvalidError

InvalidError

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May 18, 2007
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Some old software have timer overflow and other timing-related issues due to modern CPUs being much faster than what programmers had in mind back then.
 
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Forgotten031511

Forgotten031511

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Jun 1, 2015
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He is correct, software would be your only issue if any...but as far as hardware being able to play the game as in your direct question, there is no problem.
 
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Eximo

Eximo

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May 27, 2010
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16 bit applications cannot run on a 64bit OS. However, there are plenty of virtualization tools like DosBox for older titles. Some older titles have been reworked and are available through gog.com or Steam.

If you need an older Windows instance, tools like VirtualBox will let you have a guest OS. This would be virtualized hardware, so you are almost guaranteed compatibility, but not necessarily performance.

A lot of older games rely on VESA graphics, which is still a supported graphics standard on all GPUs. Even older titles 'software' render pretty much everything. A lot of IBM 100% compatible/ POSIX compliant games will run even in modern OS, they don't care as long as there is memory and CPU available to run.

I have had more luck with AMD graphics getting classic titles to run. But it is hit or miss. 9/10 graphics is the last problem.

Timing and timer overflow was a short lived problem. You can find patches for a lot of software. (one fun example is the original Civilization, it will run on anything, but it runs so fast that icons don't blink and you have to be very sure you want to move a unit in a direction (one key click gets registered as hundreds)
 
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