No Doom Experience without Win XP/2000

[Deathmatcher]

I´m not sure if anybody cares, but PlanetDoom found out that Doom3 only runs under Windows XP / 2000 and not under Win 98. I switched to Win XP only a month ago *wipes sweat off of forehead*

[DoomUK]

Yeah, I heard that.

[Alientank]

Who the hell uses 98 anyways? 2000 is much better and XP I find is a personal fav. Even though it's just a dressed up 2k kernel.

[AirRaid]

Hmmm.

Meh.

No serious gamer still uses 9x anyway.

(1337th post!)

[-Jk-]

I prefer 2K over XP as well. I find 2K to be much "cleaner" than XP.

Also, don't forget there will be a Linux version of Doom 3 ;)

[Opulent]

Um.. quite the reverse, anyone who prefers idsoftware's games would be an idiot to not be running win98.
I'd be interested in knowing exactly WHY it doesn't work in 98.

[Mogul]

Alientank said:

Who the hell uses 98 anyways? 2000 is much better and XP I find is a personal fav. Even though it's just a dressed up 2k kernel.

Hmm, how about those of us who like to play DOOM II instead of jDoom, Legacy, ZDoom or some other port that alters the gameplay?

[Epyo]

Mogul said:

Hmm, how about those of us who like to play DOOM II instead of jDoom, Legacy, ZDoom or some other port that alters the gameplay?

Doom 95 doesn't alter gameplay from what I can see. Er maybe I'm wrong.

Anyway, whew glad I got the computer with XP then. XP is just as good as 98, once you turn off fisher price mode.

[WereAllDoomed]

Is this confirmed 100%? if so guess I'll finally upgrade. Just spent £70.00 on another 512mb of Ram for this game and XP will be another £70.00, so with the game that will be a total of £170 just for doom3.

It better be f***ing good!!!

So can someone please confirm this.

[Deathmatcher]

There are some things about Win X? that really p**s me off. It may run a little more stable than Win 98 but the system manager and network interface are a mess, IMHO.
Anyways, I guess that driver issues and stuff will cause the incompatibility of Doom3 and Win 98. For example, directX support for Win 98 has ceased quite a while ago.

[useless warrior]

You know all the people talking about droping fat wads of cash to upgrade their 486 for this game, I gotta say, have you thought about xbox? It really isn't bad, also alot cheaper then buying a new computer.

[Mogul]

Epyo said:

Doom 95 doesn't alter gameplay from what I can see. Er maybe I'm wrong.

No mouse support in XP.

For those of you that have to have both -- install both. Do a dual boot. It's not that difficult and you can find help on MS's site.

[Majnun]

I haven't read the exact wording, but if they say "Windows 95/98 not supported" that does not mean that the game will not work under Win98. It means tech support will not help you if you are using Win98 and have problems. It means they don't guarantee it will work.

Thief: Deadly Shadows is exactly the same. They "don't support" it. And yes Thief:DS didn't work out of the box with Win98. But within a week or 2 people on the EIDOS & ION Storm Forums had found a workaround that enabled people to install it and run it just fine on Win98.

Now I wouldn't advise running out and getting it if you only have Win98 though (not until someone see's that it does work, or finds a workaround). But Doom 3 is alot more advanced than Thief:DS and it may never work with Win98...no matter what. But I kinda doubt it.

But, if this IS the first game that absolutely won't work with Win98...don't expect it to be the last. It just seems like you're buying winXP JUST to play Doom 3. But really you're buying it to be able to play plenty more games with bleeding edge technology that will be coming out in the future. You're going to have to upgrade eventually...this just happens to be the game that caused it. It had to happen eventually.


And as to the "have you considered an x-box"? I don't speak for everybody obviously. And I'm not saying "console's suck" blah blah blah. It's a matter of preference. But an x-box is basically an ancient pc. It's a pentium 3 733mhz, with a 64mb GeForce4 ti4200 video card...and a hard-drive if you spend the extra money on it. I wouldn't buy an x-box with your money. Contrary to what game makers and video card makers want you to believe you do NOT need one of the new $500 video cards to play the games coming out now and in the next several months. And play them at detail and resolutions better than an x-box will ever give. You can get a Radeon 9800 for about $200 right now and that card will be just fine for the next 2 years.

[TwiNCannoN]

Opulent said:

Um.. quite the reverse, anyone who prefers idsoftware's games would be an idiot to not be running win98.

maybe in the past when win98 had a dos shell, but these days the ram problems are too big to make it any worthwhile.

[Sephiroth]

yea, i prefer win2000. i own XP, and other than the laptop i dont use it much.

after i get a better graphics card, one that is more compatible with linux, then i will use the linux version.

[DaJuice]

IIRC Win98 has problems with handling more than 256MB RAM, or rather properly ustilizing more RAM than that. So basially Win98 can't cope with the memory requirements of Doom3, hence no support. Or maybe it's something else.

[Tyockell]

WereAllDoomed said:

Is this confirmed 100%? if so guess I'll finally upgrade. Just spent £70.00 on another 512mb of Ram for this game and XP will be another £70.00, so with the game that will be a total of £170 just for doom3.

It better be f***ing good!!!

So can someone please confirm this.

Hey budy I just spent $1350 canadian just for this fuckin game so your much better off.

[AirRaid]

Opulent said:

Um.. quite the reverse, anyone who prefers idsoftware's games would be an idiot to not be running win98.

What? Please explain.

[Mogul]

I can't speak for him, but my own explaination is this --

Some people really care for DOOM. Others think it's cool, but don't see playing it as it was meant to be played (DOS) that big of a deal, and they will settle for a source port.

That is fine -- who could say either party is wrong? But I know from my experience that I'm not yet willing to give up my ability to play the original DOOM games.

Source ports do a lot of good things. In fact, I spend way, way more time with ZDaemon than I do with doom2.exe, but still, my passion for DOOM and DOOM II demands that I at least do them the justice of giving myself a way to play them as they are.

It's not that big of a deal, really -- I gave five gigabytes of my hdd to put windows 98se on... now I can play doom2.exe whenever I want, even over zone, and switch back over here to XP if I need to do something else.

I like barbeque chips.

[Alientank]

WTF are you guys talking about? I can run zdoom and all the doom ports fine on XP.

[WereAllDoomed]

Just the clear-up a couple of points.

DirectX 9c is now available on Win98se..I'm using it.

98/ME can also use in excess of 512mb of Ram with a simple Sys Ini entry, stopping Windows going mad with addresses. I've been running 1gb of Ram for a week now and have only seen improvements.

I have always considered XP bloated-not really a gaming O/S, it swallows up a lot of resources and has to be tweaked a lot to get it running slickly. It had/has the refresh rate bug and the pain of activation.

Maybe ATi dropping driver support has something to do with 9x being dropped by publishers.

Until now 9x has allowed me to run games old and new, somthing Xp stuggles to do..I consider myself a true gamer.

[destx]

I don't expect id to support a six year old operating system.
I use Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003 and Debian.
I'll most likely be running Doom 3 on Windows 2000.

[leileilol]

As far as I know, Windows XP has nothing really new to offer for game support advantages. I remember a similar case with Call of Duty's modding tools not being able to install on Win9x, refusing to, because "You need Windows XP to install this". I simply extracted it with WinRAR, and all the contained programs function properly. What the hell was their big deal?

The same goes for some recent UT2004 patch that has "new maps". Blues News later provided a ZIP of it's contents to get around the XP-only installation of it.

It's all a marketing ploy, y'know. Disgusts me and others a bit. No way am I downgrading to XP. It's considered a downgrade even when you're already using WindowsME.

[Joe]

i think it may have something to do with the hard drive's file system, seeing as XP and 2000 use an NTFS file system, while 98 uses the FAT/FAT32 file system. I dont really think this would change anything as it is expected to wrk (with the correct binaries) on Linux's RAID file system.

[Revenant!]

Joe said:

i think it may have something to do with the hard drive's file system, seeing as XP and 2000 use an NTFS file system, while 98 uses the FAT/FAT32 file system.

With win2k the filesystem is optinal. I run my win2k/games HD with FAT32 because its faster than NTFS.

[WereAllDoomed]

I don't want to sound conspiratorial but I do wonder if Microsoft is putting pressure on pulishers to drop 9x OS's. When there are still hundreds of thounsands of users it dosn't seem to make sense to lose customers.

Also the fact that ID has gone to great lenghts to make D3 run older GPU's(GF4MX 440) it seem odd they would block 9x users.

I wish someone would give offical confirmation on this as I want some time to perform the upgrage and iron out the the almost garanteed problems I'll encounter.

[myk]

WereAllDoomed said:
When there are still hundreds of thounsands of users it dosn't seem to make sense to lose customers.

What kind of customers would those be, using an OS that's limiting their software development, unable to use it to its highest potential?

Also the fact that ID has gone to great lenghts to make D3 run older GPU's(GF4MX 440) it seem odd they would block 9x users.

They are just being practical, I'd say; there's no guarantee the software will work perfectly on a semi-supported aging operating system.

And from what I know Microsoft does indeed use that sort of pressure as much as it can; you should see it auto-updating its MSN Internet access software, and the number of customers that call in with resource-deprived Windows 98 or Windows Me machines.

[Deathmatcher]

There is an alternative to source ports or a double boot: The dosbox:
http://dosbox.sourceforge.net
It emulates a full DOS PC under Windows. I haven´t tried out Doom yet, but according to their list it is supported and I have succeeded in running games under Win XP with both sound and music, that didn´t even work properly under Win 98.
You may need a fast system, however, as dosbox eats up a lot of resources.

[Torn]

Tyockell said:

Hey budy I just spent $1350 canadian just for this fuckin game so your much better off.

I am gonna spend about 1600-1800$ on a new system without monitor, so shut up. :P

Does win2000 support everything, winxp does? I heard bad stories about w4r3rz0r versions of winxp, but 200$ for winxp (Micro$oft and everything = bad :P) is alot in my opinion. But oh well, maybe I should buy it.

[-Jk-]

Torn said:

Does win2000 support everything, winxp does?

I think so, except there's no DOS compatibility mode.

With some minor tweaking you can get Win9x and NT4 SP5 compatibility mode though.