[Dark Age Iron Savior]

(this topic directly aimed at Broco and other people who know this shit)

I vaguely know that Windows XP compatibility mode exists, but I've never used it, at least not successfully.

Other than the specific options, what does choosing the different modes of compatibility do? I mean, they're labeled rather obviously, but what all is involved when I tell it "run in compatibility mode for Win 98"?

Does it just tell the program "listen, I don't care what you think, you're running in Win 98", or is there more complicated work being done?

Basically, I'm trying to run the demo for this obscure 2000 shareware game, and it basically looks/runs terrible no matter what I set it for or what options I select. I'm trying to figure out if it would be a total waste of money to try and buy the full version from this sleazy retailer.

The demo was a little hard to find, but I finally tracked it down. Here's a reliable link:
http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?ek41ggmgi2m

(7mb)

NOTE: The demo executable installs and runs the game without any prompting. Be warned!

How can I run this the way it's meant to be run with the minimum number of hoops jumped through?

Man, sometimes I miss ME. The computers I use never perform reliably enough to encounter whatever massive shortcomings it had, and I usually play old games. Maybe I should look into having a separate partition for Win 98 when I finally put in a new hard drive...
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[Broco]

I don't really know what the compatibility mode is doing. In general though it's trying to recreate some of the properties of a Windows 98 environment in some ways, e.g. I would imagine by restoring old bugs in APIs that some old applications implicitly depend on. It probably does report to applications that they're running on Windows 98 as you say as well. It's not a full sandboxed emulator-style environment though, so it won't reproduce all the things about Windows 98 that a particularly weird application might depend on.

I don't know, I guess as an alternative you could try running Windows 98 in VMWare, though that's not designed for games so it might not work either.

[gooktime]

you can still get decent performance and whatnot in vmware, definitely give that a shot