PC games playable on a T20 (and above)

[Clockface]

Not sure if this is the right board for this, but I thought this post should be on the Windows board rather than on the T20 board, as it applies to the T20 upwards. Anyway, I've been going through my PC games and trying them on my T20 laptop to see what works. Every game listed here as working works on a T20 with Windows 98 SE, 128MB RAM, 700MHz CPU and a 8MB S3 graphics card, so there's no reason why they shouldn't work on more powerful machines. More memory might help the performance of some games (I've upped mine to 384MB, bought from ebay thanks to advice from these boards) but 128MB is enough to run them well.

The ones that fail usually do so because they need more than 8MB of video RAM, rather than needing a faster CPU, though of course most commercial games in the last few years aren't even worth trying (and F.E.A.R. is already pushing my desktop PC )

Anyway, these are the games I've had working

Working Windows games:

Unreal,
Unreal Tournament (best PC game ever!),
Quake 2,
Quake 3,
Half-Life,
Thief,
Thief 2,
Deus Ex,
System Shock 2,
Star Wars: Jedi Knight 2 - Outcast,
Alien vs. Predator,
Alien vs. Predator 2 (I really didn't think this would run on the T20),
Driver,
Midtown Madness (must install official patch or the graphics are corrupt),
Demolition Racer,
Worms Armageddon,
American McGee's Alice,
No One Lives Forever,
Operation Flashpoint,
Sin,
Shogo (remember to turn the FOG off in the settings, or it looks terrible),
Clive Barker's Undying,
Soldier of Fortune,
Carmageddon 2,
Carmageddon 3,
Urban Chaos,
Red Faction,
The Dark Eye,
Sentry (a freeware Sentinel clone),
The Sentinel Returns (will only work in software mode, 3Dfx mode does not work, even with DGVoodoo),
Star Trek Voyager Elite Force.


- All of the above games work fine on a T20, although Aliens vs. Predator 2 needed most graphical settings set to minimum.

- All of the games were patched to their latest versions (where I was aware of any patch), if any patches had been issued by the game's manufacturers. Use Google to find any patches.

- Some of the games, such as Unreal Tournament, Half-Life and Carmageddon 2 support user created mods, and all of the mods that I tried also ran OK.





Working DOS games:

Doom,
Doom 2,
Duke Nukem 3D,
Quake,
Carmageddon,
Shadow Warrior,
Strife,
Blood,
Rise of the Triad,
Day of the Tentacle,
Moneky Island,
Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess,
Alone in the Dark,
Dark Forces,
Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess,

- This wasn't true DOS mode (i.e., the laptop was not booted into the DOS command prompt, instead these games were all run under Windows 98, inside a (full screen) DOS box, and some games might have trouble under the DOS mode of Windows NT/2000 and XP. You can use utilities such as VMSound or a DOS emulator such as DOSBox to run DOS games under NT/2000 and XP, but that would require significantly more CPU power, which I think would be beyond a T20 at least. This is why I still use Win98 on my laptop instead of XP.

- Just about any DOS game should run (under DOS or Win95/98/ME), as the T20 has enough speed and video RAM for to satisfy any game released in the DOS years, but some early DOS games require complicated memory settings. For example, System Shock is very finicky about memory settinngs. I finally got System Shock to work on the T20, under Windows 98, and it worked fine, but it totally locked up the laptop when I tried to exit the game (I had to turn the T20 off and on to restart). Not a major problem, but annoying none the less.

- Also of course, many very early DOS games would run too fast, as they were written for the very slow machines of the day, and did not allow for faster machines.

- Some of the games, such as Doom, Quake and Duke Nukem 3D support user created mods, and all of the mods that I tried also ran OK.

- Some of these DOS games have freeware third party Windows versions available, such as Doom and Duke Nukem 3D, which add better graphics and whetever else, but I haven't yet tried these.




Working DOS Games that also work with hardware acceleration under DGVoodoo:

Carmageddon,
Grand Theft Auto (and GTA London),
Shadow Warrior,

(DGVoodoo allows games to use Glide routines on non-Glide 3D cards, and is available at http://dege.freeweb.hu/ ).


Games that [b]don't[/b] work:

No One Lives Forver 2,
Grand Theft Auto 3,
Elderscrolls III: Morrowind
Unreal Tournament 2003,
Star Trek Voyager Elite Force 2

(all five of the above games require more than the T20's 8MB of video RAM).

Postal 2 (did run, but too slowly to be playable).



I hope this list proves helpful.

[Clockface]

One correction to the above list, and one other game;

* The above list should say "Midtown Madness 2", not "Midtown Madness". I haven't tried the original MM (I can't find it), but MM2 does work fine (once it is patched). Plus for those of us from Great Britain, it's the only "realistic driving" (as in it has civilian traffic, traffic lights etc) game I know of where you drive on the left hand side of the road (when you choose London from the choice of London and San Fransisco, to drive through).

* I've tried Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight, and it works very well.