Why I hate PCs sometimes

[Aku]

I finally went cold turkey on WoW and got back into real gaming again, but didn't want to just be doing the high fantasy crap with Oblivion and NWN2, so I reinstalled some of my old strategy games. I did a round of Civ 3, and started a game of Alpha Centauri. But what I really wanted to get back into was the Total War games. So I reinstalled MTW and the Viking expansion and played a quick battle to get the feel of it again, but something wasn't right. My cursor wasn't changing or giving me information when I pass it over the units, and when I clicked to a place on the terrain for them to march to, they went off in the opposite direction. After hunting through forums, it turns out that the game isn't compatible with Nvidia 8000 series cards, one of which I bought recently. The cursor doesn't sync up right with the 3D terrain. So, I can no longer play MTW. What a waste. Well at least I have an excuse to go out and buy one of the newer Total War games. I'll probably pick up Rome Gold, it's only 20 bucks in the stores where you can find it.

[Mochan]

Well this isn't exactly a problem you'll only see on PCs. With most consoles if you want to play a game a generation or so back (which is what Medieval TW is basically) it's a crapshoot. Only the Playstation brand really gives you decent backwards compatibility and there are still games that you need to be wary of.

[Aku]

The Wii can play Gamecube, Nintendo 64, Super Nintendo, Sega, and Turbografix 16games. Although except for Gamecube the others you have to download, and they need to beef up their library more.

[Mochan]

Aside from the Gamecube, the rest is handled by ROM emulation and isn't exactly what we were talking about here.

Though if you want to go that way, well the PC can handle N64, SNES, Sega, and TurboGrafix games too as I'm sure you know. And better, since you can play a much, much larger variety of ROMs out there whereas on the VC you have to choose from the extremely limited selection, and let's not even get into the really useful features of PC emulators like fast forward/rewind and save states.

[BaneNWN]

YEP i have the visual boy emulator and the project 64 emulator.I can play n64 titles with no problems and gameboy advance games.i cant seem to figureout how to get the playstation emulator to work wish i could.Im sure the playstation emulator works good just seems like it would be a hassle to install properly

[Mochan]

The ePSXe emualator works really well and is my favorite, I got it up and running like 5 years ago. It isn't perfect though sometimes you have to experiment with which sound plugins to use for a particular CD. But I love the graphic plugins they let you play at really high res with shader effects put in to make the textures look better and stuff, it really changes the way the games look and mostly it works well.

It's also better to rip the CD to your harddisk, because if not the game can get slow especially when accessing audio from the CD directly all the time (like in Super Robot Wars).