Like I've said before, I don't buy many games. No, it's not because I download them all I just tend to buy very few games. So I have all these older games that I'm trying to play, and naturally, I've been met with some difficulties.

Warcraft II
1) I can't get sound to work because the game doesn't recognize my sound card (onboard CMedia)
2) my mouse won't move past 2/3's of the left part of the screen. I tried changing resolutions, but it still won't work. the mouse will travel the full height, but not the width. I can live without the sound, but I can't play with this problem

Dungeon Keeper 2
every time I try to start the game, it works at it for a long time, the screen goes black, then I'm back at Windows and nothing happens.

I suspect I'm going to have these sort of problems with a lot of my games. I realize I'm expecting more compatability from Win2K than I'm likely to get, but shouldn't there e fixes for these things somewhere? I mean come on, these are simple games by today's standards. I can't believe that the only games I've bought just won't play anymore. and I'm not about to get XP just for the alternate Windows environments.

Is there anything I can do? I've downloaded patches for both of these games but they didn't help

Warcraft II
I happen to own this game myself, and I've never been able to run it under Win2K. But here's what I do know: You must have DOS drivers for your sound card. Also, that mouse thing is a known bug I remember reading about. Unfortunately, the fix is something I don't remember.

Dungeon Keeper 2
While this is not a game I'm familiar with, I did have a similar problem under Win2K with another game; or more to the point - games that required DirectX and Win9x (older installments of the MechWarrior series). In this instance, I have never gotten any such games working under Win2K.

My basic solution for running older games is a nice clean dual boot - Win2K for everything except those older games, which I ran under Win98SE. I don't have my machine set up that way now because I found that I don't really play them anymore.

Thanks for your help!

I actually found out how to fix the mouse thing. there's a setting in war2.ini listed as "vidmouse=0" that you have to change to "vidmouse=1". As for sound, I'll have to look for DOS drivers. I doubt I will, but maybe they exist.

damn. I downloaded DOS drivers for my device, and I can't get sound working for Warcraft. In setup, I'm not even sure which sound card to tell it that I have, I don't think this company was even around when this game was made. Autodetect just goes back to "no sound card".

What card would be closest, or is there something else I should be doing?

According to what I remember about WarCraft II - if your soundcard isn't compatible with one of the ones listed, then you are out of luck, especially under Windows 2000.

Auto Detect jumps to "no sound card" when it doesn't find any compatible devices. You can try to force it, but WarCraft II really wants a SoundBlaster, and will ask you all the appropriate DOS settings. If you have DOS drivers you can try digging them out of your config.sys or autoexec.bat file (can't remember which).

You may just want to dig up an old SoundBlaster and drop it in there. Of course, if the sound on your mobo is really good, this means you'll be rebooting to disable onboard and enable the SB16 every time you want to play WarCraft.

The industry really doesn't give a damn if you still want to play your old games.

I got a SB Live! a while ago and I came to try and play an old DOS based game (Crusader No Remorse I think it was), I even emailed SB Tech support - stumped them for a bit until they came back with the ever popular 'not possible' response! Annoying - I can't be bothered having a second PC around, maybe an early Pentium with DOS 6.22 on and an old SB16, just to play old games but that's what it seems to need!

If you slap the SB16 in your current machine and run dual boot - one OS (in my case Win2K) running your normal sound card, and the other (in my case Win98SE) running the SB16, you should have no problem. I did this for WarCraft II on my old machine because the onboard sound wasn't compatible.

and I'm not about to get XP just for the alternate Windows environments

It's actually all built into 2000 already. Try making a shortcut to the game, opening the shortcut properties, and look for a Compatibility tab. If it's not there, follow this MS article to enable it.

Also, copies of Warcraft II Battle.net edition are dirt cheep, and it's a Windows compatible version of the game. Not sure about Dungeon Keeper advice either though, as I haven't tried playing it recently, though I thought I did under 2000 in the past. I'll try and remember to load it up sometime soon and let you know what I find.

For all my really old games, I'm building a classic gaming box soon that will house an older version of Windows and DOS, along with my trusty Turtle Beach full length ISA sound card and my Voodoo 2 SLI PCI setup.

Wow! Thanks! I had no idea that Win2K had that too! I did have to enable it, but it's very cool that it's in there.

Unfortunately, it didn't work. I told it to start DKII in Win98 compatability, but I immediately got the "DK2.exe has created errors" box and I can't get any further.

Oh well. I may do just what you are in the future. That sounds like a good idea. I really liked Dungeon Keeper...

Now I'm suddenly having a very strange problem. I'll be in the middle of a game, and all of a sudden I'm back in Windows, with the DOS window nowhere in sight, completely closed out. I got through all of Tides of Darkness without this problem, and now on Dark Portal it's suddenly just crapping out on me. What's going on?