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| Oblivion on Windows 98?? Wish Me Luck... |
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Kris Asick
Member #1,424
July 2001
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OK, before anyone comments, I am planning on getting a nice and powerful Vista system sometime later this year, so regardless of everything I'm about to say, there will be a point where this won't matter anymore. That said, I recently came across Oblivion: Game of The Year Edition at a Staples location of all places for $20 Canadian. (They even had Bioshock for $10.) I didn't pick it up because I wanted to consider if I should buy it early or not, since I'm on Windows 98 still, then I realized last night while looking up some stuff that my system actually meets all the minimum requirements... except for the OS. I also discovered that there's a user-made patch which replaces all the 2.0 shaders with 1.1 shaders to make the game more compatible with older graphics cards. (Though mine IS actually supported... barely...) They call it "Oldblivion". I looked at some screenshots and the game looks more like Morrowind with 1.1 shaders going. It's not compatible with the Shivering Isles expansion, yet, but oh well. I can just not install that part of it for now. But I ALSO discovered that there's a handful of people out there (OK, two) who managed to get it running under Windows 98 after a fair bit of coaxing. So later today I'm gonna head on over, pick up a copy (presuming they didn't already sell the two that were left), and see if I can't get it working. Either way, I've already played the game at full quality on a friend's system so I know what the game is supposed to be like. Getting it working on my system would be a hold-me-over until I could actually play it on a new system... and OK, I'm more so just looking to see if I can actually do it since I would rather play it at full quality than no quality. Wish me luck! --- Kris Asick (Gemini) |
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Don Freeman
Member #5,110
October 2004
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You could always use a Linux distro and run under Wine... And good luck to ya. -- |
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Steve Terry
Member #1,989
March 2002
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I played Oblivion and didn't like it much, of course I wanted to max out the graphics but it wasn't that impressive. Actually I found it kind of silly, you can literally drop all your clothes and run around naked through town and nobody seems to notice anything different or you can kill someone and steal all their clothes [edit] ___________________________________ |
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Kris Asick
Member #1,424
July 2001
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Thanks for the offer Steve, but I already picked up my copy. I'm a bit of an Elder Scrolls fan; I now have all four chapters. I know the AI is pretty stupid in all of them, but I like them because of the sheer amount of content they have. For example, even though I've beaten Morrowind three times now, I always find new stuff every time I play it. Anywhoo, onto the ordeal of Oblivion + Windows 98... Firstly, the installer worked perfectly fine... however, when installed on a FAT32 drive, the amount of space required increases by an entire GB for some reason... so I had to uninstall even more stuff to fit 5.6 GB of data instead of 4.6 like was indicated on the box. I think maybe because I've got the Game of The Year edition, the expansions are probably what does it. Anyways, my first attempt to run the game itself failed with a DLL error. After much research into why this was happening, I discovered that, even though Microsoft stopped updating Windows 98, some people have taken it upon themselves to make their OWN updates. One in particular, called "KernelEx", modifies many system files to provide various improvements, but most specifically, to enable software made for Windows 2000/XP to run properly. After installing this, low and behold, I have Oblivion running on my Windows 98 machine!! ...badly. Basically, to get a framerate even remotely acceptable, I have to turn the detail settings to bare minimum, which also disables ALL lighting effects, weather, fog, flowing grass, you get the idea. Basically, it looks pretty ugly and bright, but it's playable. Then I ran into the infamous sewer crash because of the water shader. After fixing that issue, I'm only left with three minor issues really. 1. The water is PURPLE. Bright, freakin', purple. 2. For some mysterious reason, these little grass patches outdoors kill the framerate if several appear on screen or I get close to any. 3. If I go into the graphics options menu, then leave, it crashes the game. Other than that, what else can I say? It works. --- Kris Asick (Gemini) |
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Neil Black
Member #7,867
October 2006
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I've had a copy of Oblivion for PC for ages, but I haven't had a computer that can run it.
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LennyLen
Member #5,313
December 2004
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Kris Asick said: low and behold
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Kris Asick
Member #1,424
July 2001
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My worst kind of typo. Maybe I shouldn't've bought Oblivion, because I just spent the past six hours playing it, missing sleep among other things... I did manage to get the water colour and grass slowdowns fixed, plus the weather works now too. That said, running with all the details virtually off makes the game look like a development alpha! There lots of object pop-up, undrawn areas because there's no distance fog, no lighting, even the multi-texturing fails at certain parts of the landscape, making for sudden texture changes. During the course of the past six hours straight of Oblivion gaming, I only had one crash very early in and one hang about halfway in. It seems the memory management of Oblivion is MUCH better than that of Morrowind. I wonder what else I may be able to run now with those Windows 98 patches installed and functional... --- Kris Asick (Gemini) |
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