jay on 2/1/2009 at 01:47
I recently decided that there were too many interesting looking recent Thief FMs to not have Thief intalled on my computer (been about 2 years since I last played...think my last FM was Keyhunt). Problem is that I recently got a new laptop with lots of whizzbang stuff (ie dual core, vista, etc). Tried intalling Thief 2 and met with no success. Looking through the forums it sounds as if this par for the course. I tried alot of the fixes listed (Ddfix, codec fix, editing cfg, etc) and got no joy. I don't think I am savvy enough to go too much deeper into getting the game installed and working so had a different idea...
Has anyone out there purposely bought an older machine for playing "legacy" games on? What would you look for in a comp? What are good places to look? (besides ebay). How much did you spend? Any thoughts/ideas/advice would be appreciated. thanks
Wille on 2/1/2009 at 08:49
My old computer I gave to my brother has AMD Athlon 64 3800+ (no dual core or hyperthreading), 1GB DDR RAM, SB Live! and GeForce 6800GS.
It can run all FMs smoothly but for good graphics it needs ddfix because all GeForce cards that are 6XXX series or above cause Thief 2 to have ugly green dithering effects etc. If it had ATI X800 or X850 it might run Thief 2 properly without ddfix. I know that ATI 9800 had problems with fog but I don't know much about other ATI cards and Thief, maybe Bikerdude can enlighten us more.
Your processor should be something like in my brother's machine, powerful but without dual core or hyperthreading. This means older AMDs are your best bet because Intel's Pentium 4 CPUs and above have hyperthreading or dual core.
voodoo47 on 5/1/2009 at 22:08
all dx9 radeons should run vanilla thief with no problems (assuming the latest drivers are installed).I personally use x1950series cards in all my pcs now..and I don't really plan to upgrade anytime soon,'cause I want to keep the ability to run all dark engine based games natively as long as I can :ebil:
Brian The Dog on 6/1/2009 at 10:59
I built a legacy Win98SE box last year to play Thief missions on - see (
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=117669) here for the details. In the end I went for:
Sempron 3000 (Socket 754) - single core
MSI K8MM3-V Motherboard with S3 onboard graphics
512Mb 400MHz RAM
40Gb IDE Hard Drive
Micro-ATX case with PSU
The whole lot came to around £130 here in the UK. The big problem was getting a motherboard with onboard graphics and audio that had drivers for Win98.
You could always just buy a basic motherboard and buy "old" peripherals to put in it. For instance, buy a (
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/98073) sound card and a (
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/113152) graphics card with Win98 drivers, turn off all fancy stuff in the PC bios, and you should be away.
It should all work fine with Windows 2000 if you're struggling to find Win98 hardware, but I was lucky and found Win98 compatable stuff.
Wille on 7/1/2009 at 08:38
Windows XP or 2000 shouldn't be a problem for Dark Engine games. For T1 you just have to use -lgntforce command to get the installer running but everything else should work perfectly fine with them. So Win98 isn't needed unless you want to have good DOS support :).
My sister's computer (my old again :p) has GeForce 4800SE AGP (equals 4400) and it runs Dark Engine games very well.
EDIT:
After reading old tech support threads I found out that GF4X00 series won't render stars in vanilla T2. I have to test this out as it has been a while since I tried that 4800SE.
ffox on 7/1/2009 at 16:03
A Radeon X1300 is only £15 and runs Thief 1, 2 and 3 well. You need 7.11 or later drivers for good fog in T2.
