Thank you for being a valued part of the CNET community. As of December 1, 2020, the forums are in read-only format. In early 2021, CNET Forums will no longer be available. We are grateful for the participation and advice you have provided to one another over the years.

Thanks,

CNET Support

General discussion

Older Win9x and their video modes

Dec 9, 2009 10:58PM PST

Windows 7 seems to support older Windows 95/98 games pretty well. There are now more compatibility options and I think I read somewhere that backward-compatibility has improved in 7. But there are a couple of issues with video.

First of all, some (if not many) older games running in 256 or 16-bit color modes don't display the correct colors. I found a makeshift solution that involves opening the screen resultion settings from the desktop then starting the game with the settings window open. This fixes the colors, but why? More importantly, is it possible to permanently achieve the same results?

The next thing isn't really a "problem", it's just inconvient/annoying. Of course, a majority of older games run in 640x480, 800x600, or some other low-res video mode. These games run fine in 7, but the system resolution doesn't change to fit the game's native resolution. Because of this, the game screen is small and surrounded by borders. I tried running a game in 640x480 mode, but that doesn't change anything. Is there a program that can hook these games and force them to change the system resultion to their native modes? Or maybe upscale the video to the system's higher resolution?

Discussion is locked

- Collapse -
I'm going with no.
Dec 9, 2009 11:02PM PST

The same workaround was one I used in Windows 2000 and to this day. If they didn't fix it in 9 years then there is little hope for a fix today.
Bob

- Collapse -
Ok, but what about screen resolution?
Dec 10, 2009 7:08AM PST

Is there anything to fix the screen resolution though?

- Collapse -
It gets worse.
Dec 10, 2009 9:19AM PST

With the change to wide screen displays?

Do look up DOSBOX as it helps sometimes.

- Collapse -
DirectX
Dec 11, 2009 5:18AM PST