Vista Incompatibilities

[specialbao1]

Age of Empires 2 loads but unable to start a load a saved game.Or to start a new mission.

[CoffeeFiend]

OMG. I finally found a 2nd app that doesn't run as-is (out of well over 200 different apps)

modifype needs to run in XP compatibility mode or it acts retarded, and doesn't understand any arguments passed...

Just for having weird issues over such trivial things, I just might share the source code to my own toy (FixPE) that does the same thing (w/o the bugs of course). It's about a hundred lines of C# total, 7KB compiled. It's really simple to do anyways.

Edited July 12, 2008 by crahak

[Fredledingue]

I have two:

-The french digital encyclopedia "Encyclopedia Universalis". Not the latest version (thought released after and compatible with XP), yet I'm not going to buy the new version to run it on Vista, given the price. In this case the "last version" rule shouldn't apply. (it should apply only if there is a free upgrade available IMO).

-The Canon Powershot S10 driver. We had to buy a flash memory drive, which after all is much easier than connecting the photo camera. Yet, it's something that Vista refused to run. Canon's website never provided any update.

[PC_LOAD_LETTER]

added the bit about modifyPE only in compatibility mode.

as for Age of Empires II, my boss plays it on a Dell D830 with Vista SP1 without any problems. If you are interested, ill ask him what version/patches hes running but to my knowledge its an off the cd install with no hacks.

the latest version rule is there because this isnt a "try to find ancient software that wont run on Vista thread" its more of a "find things that should work on Vista but don't thread"

as for the Powershot S10 not working under Vista, the product release date was October of 1999 - 2+ years before XP was released which puts it outside the scope of #4

[CoffeeFiend]

-The french digital encyclopedia "Encyclopedia Universalis". Not the latest version (thought released after and compatible with XP), yet I'm not going to buy the new version to run it on Vista, given the price. In this case the "last version" rule shouldn't apply. (it should apply only if there is a free upgrade available IMO).

I have the old Universalis 10 (that's already 3 versions out of date) working fine under Vista SP1. They even have a page about it on their site here.

For the camera, it's unfortunate, but it's a 2 megapixel point & shoot from 1999 (9 years old is a LONG time in the world of digital cameras), so it's understandable that at some point they cut the support... A $10 card reader works fine here indeed, or one could get a 6MP+ camera that gives much more detailed photos, has a better zoom range, works much faster, has a far better LCD and better/more modern menus/better processing features, more advanced functions (like histograms), uses more modern card types, can use FAT32 formatted cards too, has USB2, often records quicktime movies and such, and quite often nowadays even has an orientation sensor (no need to manually rotate your photos anymore), etc -- all for $100-ish. Might be time for an upgrade really.

@geek: about ModifyPE, I'm not quite sure who to blame, as it checks arguments in a non-standard way (it doesn't even work if you type modifype, the program name itself is case sensitive too! it has to be ModifyPE)

[Fredledingue]

Geek,

I don't think anybody is trying to find old abandonwares not working on Vista for the sake of it. If I expect a software to work on Vista and, huh!, it doesn't: I post it here.

With all your rules, the list is likely to be very short.

Crahack,

Thanks for the link to Universalis. I'll see if I can apply the patch.

Well, this camera is old, but we are still very happy with it.