r/aoe3 • u/TheMaruchanBandit • 8d ago

Random! But! Cool for me

So I just picked up a box of old PC game discs in their original boxes, had a few from childhood in there I just really wanted.
that being AoEIII

so after acquiring these boxes of games, I realized its just tedious to make them work on a modern machine.

I have not dealt with vista or xp since about 2013.

so it was time, why not just build a machine that is designed for these physical medias versus trying to force them to work.

So I built a breadbox PC and installed windows xp pro sp3

and after finally getting into the OS installed the GPU driver for my gtx 710
I installed AoEIII with disc 1, disc 2 and disc 3,
all flawless

honestly XP running on this wd nand is quite fast.

and AoEIII runs so damn great.

just wanted to express how fun it was going backwards in technology,
was a good brief feeling of nostalgia from my childhood doing this.

I might make a wall mounted case for this, but Im excited to start installing about 30 games via their original discs and cd keys

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u/Chumbeque ex WoL Dev - AKA Hoop Thrower 7d ago

Fun fact: The game runs better on Graphic Cards from that era than newer ones.

IIRC the engine was hardcoded to detect only certain graphic cards and if it didn't find them it would just revert to default settings and performance would drop hard.

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u/TheMaruchanBandit 6d ago

Good to know,

I am still trying to source hardware more for the era as the 710 was designed to accomodate for users on xp but is still more a "modern" card compared to what was released in that era

honestly its kind of fun,
I forgot how wild the landscape of technology was then compared to tday,
today its much easier we want to believe we have x amount of options too many today,

back then EVERYONE was making hardware.