Anyone have Half-Life working on XP?

[suprfli]

from everything i've read it's nearly impossible to get half-life to work well on XP. i have a geforce2 GTS w/64MB RAM and love playing counter-strike but i don't want to put winXP pro on my win98se machine b/c i'm concerned it will make playing half-life impossible. can anyone verify this either way?

[Keldyn]

I just installed Half-Life on my XP box last night and it runs quite smoothly. The only problem i encountered was using Xp's default supplied drivers for my geforce 2 MX/400. Download the latest detonators and you should be fine. Good luck.

Greetz

[L3onheart]

Half life is smoother, faster, and more reliable in XP

[suprfli]

hrm. a friend of mine has the latest drivers and the same card and said he's had horrible problems w/winXP and half-life. every other game runs great except for a few older ones(such as HL) but he said the new games and the latest drivers are incredible.

i got some info from tweakxp.com making it sound like HL is unplayable w/o serious tweaking.

i already have winXP pro on 2 of my other machines and love it but i'm scare to touch my win98se gaming machine. drivers adn everythign are always so touchy for games. if you guys convince me to upgrade from win98se to winXP and then i can't play CS i'll have to kick some mofo's a$$es. lol. :p :rambo:

[Keldyn]

Hmm... unfortunately in the alphabet soup that is the computing world, the range of different hardware and configurations is near endless and if its one thing i have learned, its that hardware is not consistent. What works for someone, will not neccessarily work for another. If you really are unsure about taking that step why not just do an upgrade install, then if you hate it, you can go right back to win98 se no problems ? Or set aside a separate partition for it, or even a spare HD if you have one laying about....

Really though i have heard similar stories with people screaming blue murder with Tribes 2 not working on XP. On my machines, it works flawlessly. All six of them. In the end, it comes down to taking a chance, just be careful, and as always back up any important data before making major changes to your system.

In my personal opinion, XP is great as a gaming OS. I have yet to encounter a real problem, compatibility wise...

Greetz

[Zombie9920]

Half Life runs pretty darn good on my XP machines(1 of them is a 1.7ghz P4 oc'ed to 2.1ghz and my other machine is an Athlon XP..the P4 has a GF2 Ultra and the AXP has a GeForce 2 Ti). Hell it even runs good on a friend of mines' machine w/XP(he has a lowly 800mhz PIII, 128MB of PC-133 ram and a GeForce 2 MX).

[Keldyn]

Hell it even runs good on a friend of mines' machine w/XP(he has a lowly 800mhz PIII, 128MB of PC-133 ram and a GeForce 2 MX).

Dude ! You call that lowly ? :s I even got Half-Life to run on a crappy AMD K6-2 475 with 128MB ram and an old TNT2 M64 graphics card.

heh ok, frame rates blowed but it did run... :p

200 posts !!! W00t w00t !!!

[Zombie9920]

Well, an 800mhz PIII w/ a GeForce 2 MX isn't all that bad, but compared to todays standard machines an 800mhz x86 CPU is low end.

[Keldyn]

Oh i agree completely. It just made me laugh. I have a P III 866 connected to my network and i never considered it lowly. Heh heh, i remember bragging about how l337 it was when i first got it. :p

[Zombie9920]

I used to have an 866mhz PIII. That thing totally rocked when I first built the system. I wish that Intel would reconsider on thier plans to kill the [email protected]. If they would realease a 1.4 or 1.5ghz PIII Tualatin-S I would buy it and I would probably sell my AthlonXP and P4 systems. The reason I would get rid of the AXP system is because I find it to be unstable after hours of gaming and I would get rid of the P4 because a 1.5ghz PIII would straight up whoop the crap outta the P4+it would be reliable like the P4. Damn Intel and thier P4 high horse. :(

[baphomet_irl Veteran]

half-life should even run fine on a PII-266 with a Voodoo2 - it did on mine...

remember HL is basically the Quake1.5 engine - so it should run very well on any moderately modern machine

[Zombie9920]

LoL, that shows how much I know about HL. I thought it was based on a Quake II like engine because it supports Mouse Look and it natively supports OpenGL without a patch. :p I don't even play it anymore because I finally beat it(That fat alien at the end is a b1tch to kill).

[baphomet_irl Veteran]

Originally posted by Zombie9920

LoL, that shows how much I know about HL. I thought it was based on a Quake II like engine because it supports Mouse Look and it natively supports OpenGL without a patch. :p I don't even play it anymore because I finally beat it(That fat alien at the end is a b1tch to kill).

yeh a lot of ppl think its the Q2 engine - but it is more of an enhanced Q1 engine, with a far larger color pallette and higher res textures. Also I think it has the QuakeWorld net code integrated - but it is still very laggy IMO. Remember that Half Life was in development for about 3 years r smthin. Quake1 has mouselook - u just type '+mlook' at the console.. I was playin Q1 last night - what a great game :)

PS - correction the net code does have some tweaks over QuakeWorld - but i still think its very stuttry - even with a ping of 80:

We then met with Yahn Bernier, who gave us a summary of the work he's done with Half-Life's networking code. Having Quake, Quake II, and Quakeworld's codebase to work on over the last two years, Yahn was quick to catch onto the quandary of interpolated vs. extrapolated networking. To the great relief Quakeworld fans, Valve chose to work with the extrapolated model, giving clients a much more responsive, precise feel. They've also done more work on the bandwidth reduction side, moving all non-critical animations and effects to the client side. Whereas the server controlled the rotating of the weapons and armor in Quake, a HL server will merely tell the client that armor is present, and any accompanying animation is handled directly from the client. This means that non-critical animations may not appear identical on each client (death animations may differ and the like), but the benefits may be happily reaped by those not fortunate enough to have cable modem or ISDN.

[simms]

hl works fine on my comp...but i'm running cs :)

[Ren (Killshot)]

make sure u update 2 the latest patch of HL, (were talking about 100mb) and it should run fine, otherwise XP will just spit it out telling you it suck's go find a better game like Q3BFP or Q3UT :p

[Vinh]

i get mouse lags, other then that its all fine

[baphomet_irl Veteran]

or RA3 or CPMA :D

u should be able to get HL workin - i play Quake1 in XP with no probs

[Dashel]

Mine runs great under XP. Had a slight issue with quitting one game and joining another but the latest Kyro II drivers seem to have fixed this. Framerate and stability wise it is spot on.

PS: HL uses a highly modified Q2/QW engine.

[mtgriffith]

I am running it using a Voodoo 5 with hacked drivers.

It plays smooth with the 3DFX glide drivers. When I was using the Windows drivers and Direct 3D I had problems switching between the game and the screen to save my game.

[Nodiaque]

Just use the latest detonator drivers and the latest patch and it will work fine. My friend have the same piece of hardware and it work fine.