games that will run on poor system

[chris123]

ok.

have really bad system, but am building new one soon, money just doesn't grow on trees anymore!!

this is what i have

amd 500mhz
8meg on board graphics
265 meg ram
20 gig HDD
XP home

so it's terrible, but hay!

am currently playing half life on minimum settings, but is still amazing.

does anyone have any suggestions of any good (old/classic) games i can play on it?

cheers for any help.

[Spunkey]

Grand Prix Legends
Grand Prix 3 (if you can get hold of it)
Quake, Quake2, Q3A
Toca, Toca2
Colin McRae Rally
Red Alert, RA2, Tiberian Sun poss

[0iD]

Try nipping over to Freeloader, they have quite a few there, freedownloadscenter, or there's always Shockwave.

[SilentDeath]

freeloader is crap, games take hours to install, mayaswell buy the original game, if you can still get it...

I second quake2, the best game imo, for an old pc.

Also xcom apocalypse was good

systemshock2 (might not run on winxp)

[chris123]

just got hold of a copy of quake 2. ok so it doesnt look stunning, but is pretty playable. actually am quite amazed at how well it runs on an old system.
am so looking forward to the jump from this too a new rig with ati 9800 pro, amd 2500...etc. i will be blown away

cheers for the advice, am currently scouring the web for down load games.

ps where does everyone buy their games from online. found MX2 look cheap and good. anyone use other places?

cheers

[GreenPiggy]

Civ2 and Master of Orion2 of you like strategy.
Also Shogun:Total War may play on it.

[Ferral]

System Shock 2 will run on XP.

You have to use the install wizard on XP and select either 98 or Me compatibility. First time the game runs it will be in 640x480 but you can change that in the games options.

Thief 1 will also run on that spec with little or no trouble, Nocturne runs quite well in 640x480 on that spec, I would just install 1 mission at a time though if you get Nocturne as it has something around a 1.3 Gb install if you install all the missions in one go.

Dungeon Keeper 2 will run well if you like Strategy games, Legacy of Kain : Soul Reaver (1st one only), only other one I can think of at present and cannot be missed at all is Lucasarts subliminal Grim Fandango, I played that on a HP machine a few years ago with an onboard graphics card that was 4 mb and 128 Mb ram in the machine, it also had a Celeron 433 processor in it. Ran well under hardware with the DX8 support.

[0iD]

for retrotastic stuff, hav a look at natomic studios http://www.natomic.com/

[directhex]

actually, it's system shock 2 1.x that don't run on xp - you get a special "system shock to detected, don't even try" message from windows. patch it to 2.3 (the multiplayer patch) and it'll run fine.

civ2 is a great idea too

though bear in mind quake 2 runs on a p133 happily, and civ2 needs a 486 dx2. don't sell your system short

[yamangman]

Perhaps try Sid Meiers Alpha Centauri instead of Civ II. You might have to wait a bit longer between turns though. Total Annihilation? err, there are too many . Narrow down your likings a bit for us.

[directhex]

hell, half-life runs on a p120 with 24mb ram...

[këö¬t]

i used to have a similar rig.

• gta2 - playable, but a tad too slow, makes the game much easier though.
• unreal tournament - runs fine and they'res tons of modifications available for it. great game.
• simcity 2000 - if this didn't work i'd be worried.
• simcity 3000 - works in low-res mode very well.
• megadrive / snes emulation - worked fine.
• mame - old games worked fine, but very few modern ones.
• shockwave/flash games - well, my old machine used to struggle playing weebl and bob...

a worthwhile quick and cheap upgrade would be a pci (i doubt your machine has an agp slot) graphics card, although the bios may be extremely troublesome for it (e.g. to boot my old machine using a radeon 9000 card you'd need to place all the other pci devices in different slots each boot - fun...) it should be trivial to overclock your cpu by 50MHz (not much, but this is 10%). stay away from isa devices as they can absorb a lot of cpu. think about downgrading to windows 2000 or stripping xp bear. debian stable should work fine if you want to try linux.

hth

[Skeps]

Command And Conquer series, not generals though

[guybrush]

Deus Ex might just run on that.. If it does your in for an absolute treat, fantastic narrative, action and rpg elements along with real freedom in how you play.
System Shock 2 I second, but no one mentioned the fantastic:
Theif 1 : The Dark Project
Theif 2 : The Metal Age
Warcraft 2 , Age of empires 1 (maybe 2)
Also all the emulation you can squeeze out of that box, snes, megadrive, nes and everything before those will run very nicely.

[Slick]

cs 1.5

[Jiff Lemon]

Battlezone - one of the greatest games of all time
Homeworld - Amazing strategy game.
worms 2 - Just HOW much fun?

In fact - check out the sold-out label. www.sold-out.co.uk Plenty of good stuff there.