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Cyb

Win98 Users SOL

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Over at Planet Doom there's news update dealing even more with Doom 3's minimum specs. Apparently PD heard a rumor that Windows 98 wouldn't be supported by Doom 3, so they went and asked Activision about it. Activision of course confirmed that Doom 3 was only meant to run on Windows XP or Windows 2000 and nothing lower. So, if you're still upgrading you may want to add XP or 2k to your shopping cart as well. As a bit of a side note, if you or someone you know is in college them you may be able to snag a copy (upgrade or full) at a considerable discount from the sticker price.

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FP! Aw crap... now I really need a new computer if I want to play Doom 3. I have 98SE...

EDIT: Heh... this is my first ever FP!

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That doesnt make sense, the game is being ported to Linux and MacOs, so how can it require a specific version of Windows? All id games are multiplatform

Pure comedy, I bet its just a marketing ploy by Microsoft and Activsion, Id probably has nothing to do with this

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Read the wording more carefully. Activison never said that Doom 3 required 2000 or XP. They said it was meant to be run on 2000 or XP.

What they're basically saying is that Win '98 users are free to try running Doom 3, and may even be able to do so without any problems. If, however, Win '98 users do have troubles running Doom 3, Activion won't provide any technical support for them. This makes perfect sense considering Windows '98 is no longer supported by the company who created it.

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if doom 3 only was able to run on windos xp and 2k shouldnt it have been in pc gamers article called 10 things you need to know about running doom 3 on your pc? the article was about the requirements and there was no mention of any os being needed

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NiGHTMARE said:

Read the wording more carefully. Activison never said that Doom 3 required 2000 or XP. They said it was meant to be run on 2000 or XP.

No, thats the wording of the news reporter on this SITE, has absolutley no correlation to what Activision said. i alerady saw this news, supposedley the game wont support anything below Win2000

It may still *run* on Win98, but patches for its bugs and technical support wont be given

Complete bullshit, a scam to force people to buy the latest from Mocrosoft

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BLOODY MURDER!! I don't believe that they force us to upgrade to XP for this game! Grrr!

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i emailed activision about doom 3 only running on xp and 2k and this is the reply i got. Unfortunately we cannot answer this question you will have to wait til the System Specs are officially released. when will the specs be released the game comes out tuesday.

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Oh, quit bitching. XP is seventeen orders of magnitude better and more stable than 98 anyway.

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This doesn't sound like somehting iD software would do. What's so different about Windows 2000 and Windows XP, besides being NT based, that would prevent Doom 3 from working on Windows 98?

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Ubik said:

Oh, quit bitching. XP is seventeen orders of magnitude better and more stable than 98 anyway.

Yeah, and pretty easy to get too heh.

AgentSpork said:

This doesn't sound like somehting iD software would do. What's so different about Windows 2000 and Windows XP, besides being NT based, that would prevent Doom 3 from working on Windows 98?

Every single ram issue known to man?

I'm sure if you pumped win98 with enough ram it'd run doom3 no problems... windows is windows. However, you're in for rebooting like every couple of levels I bet due to win98's terrible ram bs.

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I've been considering this for a while now, but I guess it's time now to get a second hard drive and set up a dual-boot system (Windows 98 to play the old games and has DOS mode, and Windows XP for Doom 3 and the newer games).

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Ubik said:

Oh, quit bitching. XP is seventeen orders of magnitude better and more stable than 98 anyway.

I can keep my Win98 computer running for more than a month at a time. The stereotype of instability placed on Win98 is mostly false and was actually a result of the poor stability of versions of IE which generally came with Win98 (3.0, 4.0). After upgrading to 5.5 and then to 6.0, my system stability is much higher than it ever was before.

Eliminating retarded and unnecessary background programs that sit in the system tray helps a lot, too.

Anyways, I have vowed to never use any subsequent version of Windows on one of my personal computers, and no game will change that. Provided I get a new computer, I won't be running Windows on it.

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Wobbo said:

Complete bullshit, a scam to force people to buy the latest from Mocrosoft

Why on earth should a publisher support an operating system which has been abandoned by it's developer? Answer: they shouldn't. You can expect to see a lot more publishers dropping technical support for Win '98 in the near future.

Really, as I said in my previous post this isn't about the differences between certain versions of Windows, it's about the fact that Microsoft has dropped technical support for Win '98, and now games publishers are starting to do the same thing.

Publishers not going to bother testing their games in Windows '98 any more, and so to cover their arses in case Win '98 users encounter any problems, they say "Windows 2000/XP required" even though it may well actually work perfectly in Win '98. And if there are any problems, and Win '98 users phone up their technical support lines, they can simply say "sorry, your OS is not support" and hang-up, or whatever.

If Doom 3 does prove to not work in Win '98, and you're so absolutely dead set against installing 2000 or XP, there's bound to be a version of Doom 3 for Linux so why not use that?

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I agree with Ubik. Windows XP is infinitely superior. I'm running a beta of SP2 on my laptop plus all of MS's software, have done so for a few weeks now, and it's been running smooth as you please with absolutely no crashes (I switched back to MS's software - Media Player, IE etc - because it's more memory efficient. Media Player for instance uses on average half the RAM of the latest Winamp, often less, and a quarter as much as iTunes). SP1 also performed wonderfully with almost no crashes, and even fewer that actually bought down the whole system. Every other XP system I've had to deal with has given similar results. I've never been forced to reboot either version for performance reasons.

Quasar is right though. If you handle it right, Win98SE can also be pretty stable, but curiously, I found it performed better on older machines. Even then, I found the constant maintenance a chore and gave up on it. There's better things to do.

Most of the virus and security glitches had patches released before the virus hit, and in almost all cases it was plain old user idiocy that let them spread.

Ichor - I've found most games work under XP with a little cajoling. Which ones concern you most?

Complete bullshit, a scam to force people to buy the latest from Mocrosoft


Yawn. MS conspiracy theories got old a long time ago. Windows XP performs better with the kind of hardware Doom 3 will need to run. Period. Name one industry where old versions of anything are supported by manufacturers ad infinitum. Independant groups may do, but the core industries always move on to the latest and greatest.

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I'd say this is only a good thing. First, I believe that even Windows ME can't recognize over 512 MB of RAM. The game *requires* 384! And even if you do have Windows ME as well as 384+ MB of RAM, that version of Windows is notorious for a memory leak problem.

Not to mention that anyone who can run Doom 3 semi-decently is probably running Windows 2000/XP already. After all, the CPU hardware you'd have bought would have been brand new in late 2001 (i.e. after XP was released).

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Any DOS based games. I know there are source ports for a lot of them, but I still use DOS to start them. Also, I use DCK, which can only be run in DOS. Still, if I must use XP, I'd rather make it a dual-boot system (there are some other reasons as well).

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It will probably be temporary anyway, but I would like to keep Windows 98 around for at least a while, just in case I need it.

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If that's true, it sucks hard. It make me doubt if I really want the game.

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JoelMurdoch said:

Dual booting is tedious and if you can avoid it you should. See if this helps any.

http://www.gginc.org/post5-1.html

useful!
(an aside: doom.exe support in XP just depends upon whether or not your soundcard has legacy drivers -- at least in my experience)

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Dual booting isn't tedious at all, especially on modern machines where it only takes a few minutes to format in fat32, etc.

Create a partition (big enough to put 98 on and your doom.exe stuff)

Install 98 on it.

Format the other partition in NTSF

Install XP on it

Easy.

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I believe the FAT32 partition must be the first on the drive, or at least before the 2GB limit of the drive, to allow Windows 98 to be able to boot. And obviously Windows 98 wouldn't be able to read your NTFS partition(s).

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Wobbo said:

Complete bullshit, a scam to force people to buy the latest from Mocrosoft

I used to test games for a living and let me tell you, having to test the game on Win98, Win98SE, WinME, Win2K, and WinXP on every possible computer configuration was a real fucking pain in the ass, espcially considering that there were generally *very* few bugs that had anything to do with the OS. I bet the Activision QA was on their knees thanking God, because this literally reduced their compatibility testing workload by 60%.

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Mogul said:

Dual booting isn't tedious at all, especially on modern machines where it only takes a few minutes to format in fat32, etc.

Create a partition (big enough to put 98 on and your doom.exe stuff)

Install 98 on it.

Format the other partition in NTSF

Install XP on it

Easy.


Right on! I've had a 98/XP dual boot up for almost a year without any problems. I use partition magic which can hide the partition that's not in use. If you use one drive, you MUST put 98 on the first partition, however.

Barring that, our workstation for our business has an interesting setup. We have a drive bay system where exact duplicates of the programs and data exist on several different operating systems (98, 2000 Server, and XP Pro I think) Only one of the bays is actually active and the others just serve to store the drives. When you want to switch OS's you just shut down, change the drive in the active bay to the one you want and power back on.

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