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Remember the old days when you could just go grab a SimCity CD-ROM out of your older brother's room to play on your own PC, then take it over to your friend's house and show him how awesome it was? Afterwards his mom took you and your best bud to hang out at the mall and you bought more games and forgot all about SimCity. That is until your brother realized it was missing and what followed turned into a very unpleasant experience for you.
Well, those days are over. Today, almost all our games are delivered to us digitally over the internet. Skipping the trip to the store every time we need a gaming fix has made life convenient, but at the expense of flexibility in what we can and cannot do with the games that we 'own'. I put that in quotes because typically you do not actually own anything, but are only given a license to use that digital content according to the store's terms of service.
I don't like paying for things twice. So as a parent with young children I'm always cognizant of how I obtain games that I may want to share with them either now or in the future. For me, if the price of the game is the same, the next thing I look at is which stores it is available on. The ease of sharing games with your family or others is going to be completely up to the storefront that your purchase from. Even then, some publishers may restrict their games from being shared at all.
Steam
The most popular storefront for PC gamers has allowed sharing for quite some time now, and it's easy to set up.
You will need to have Steam Guard enabled.
The trickiest part of sharing with Steam is you will need to log into the same computer your friend or child has previously logged in to with your Steam account. Once you do that, you will need to click on Settings -> Family -> Family Sharing Library and you should see an account there to share with. You'll need to do that for each computer you want share with.
One of the best features about Steam's family sharing is that each person gets their own cloud saves, so you don't have to worry about the users who you share with ruining your save data, but there are some limitations.
Only one person can play a single shared title at a time. If the owner attempts to play a game that someone else is already playing, that user will have to exit the game. You can share with five other accounts and authorize up to ten computers. You can manage all the users and computers you have authorized through the Steam application itself.
Steam also provides a feature called Family View, which allows you to select features of Steam (such as chat or forum content) and a list of youngster approved games that should go into your Family Games library. During Family View setup, you'll enter a PIN which can be used to disable family view and gain access to everything again. This needs to be setup on each account that you share with.
Microsoft Store
The Microsoft Store may be one of the most welcoming when it comes to sharing games with your friends and family. Similar to Steam, it allows you to share with up to five users on up to ten different devices. However, unlike Steam you can play on multiple PCs simultaneously. My kids can both play Minecraft on their own PCs from the copy that I actually didn't purchase but received with an Xbox One Minecraft bundle, which is another side benefit of the Microsoft Store. With Play Anywhere titles, you get the rights to play on both console and PC.
You will need to create a family group for your Microsoft account and each user will need their own Microsoft account, including children. You can manage the members in your family group here.
Once the family group is created you then simply need to login to the PC as the user you want to share the game with and open the Microsoft Store to download the game. Each user will have their own game saves and, as mentioned, can play simultaneously. This approach should also work for other content on the Microsoft Store such as apps, movies, or TV shows.
Another bonus for parents is Microsoft will allow you to set screen time limits, location sharing, content filtering, and even send you a weekly report of your child's activities on their PC.
GOG
CD Projeckt's GOG.com is a bit of an outlier on this list in that it does not sell games with DRM attached to it. Games are solely protected by the honor system. You can download any game you own and do with it what you want, such as store it on external hard drives for backup. However, giving it to a friend is specifically not allowed according to GOG.com's FAQ:
Your account and games are for your personal use only. If you want to share them, you can always buy a gift for that person. The DRM-free nature of our service means that we trust you that this will not be abused.
So don't do it.
However, you are allowed to install your games on as many computers as you want within your household. Therefore, sharing with your family members is fine as long as they are living with you. However, those users won't be able to take advantage of GOG.com's cloud saving feature.
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Epic Games Store
The newly launched online storefront from the makers of the ever popular Fortnite does not seem to offer any family friendly features at this time. This isn't all that surprising as this is not one of the must have features to get a new store out there. Hopefully, Epic decides to add the feature to their service soon.
Origin
Origin does not provide a way to share games with others at this time either. They do, however offer a gifting feature, but you will have to pay for the game again in order to share it with others.
As the battle over backwards compatibility rages between Xbox One and PS4, the PC looks on at this tribal console scuffle with detached amusement.
The option to dust off and boot up old games has always been a perk of the Windows platform, making the idea of ‘backwards compatibility’ virtually non-existent. Yesteryear’s games should just work.
But, as Windows modernises to match the demands of recent games, running your Ultimas, Theme Hospitals and other retro titles can get tricky. So, for TechRadar's PC Gaming Week 2018, we’ve gathered the best ways to get your old PC games back on their feet in Windows 10, and in better shape than ever before.
How to Run DOS Games in Windows 10
It’s been aeons since Windows ran through the DOS prompt, which is a problem for many games from the '90s that are designed for the ancient command-line interface. That’s where DOSBox comes in.
DOSBox is a DOS emulator that’s so vital to running DOS-era games on modern PCs that DRM-free game retailer GOG.com (the best legal source for old games) integrates it with all the games in its store.
If you have a DOS game installed, you can just drag and drop its executable icon (it's usually a '.exe' or '.bat' file) over the DOSBox icon, and you’re away.
If you don't want to go through this drag-and-drop process each time, you can create a shortcut for your game that automatically runs it in DOSBox.
First, download and install DOSBox, then create a shortcut to the DOSBox executable (right-click DOSBox and select 'Create shortcut').
Move your newly-created shortcut to where you want to open your game from. Next, right-click the shortcut, click 'Properties', then the 'Shortcut' tab, then in the 'Target' box (leaving a space after the existing text) type the full directory path of your game's executable file in quotes.
So to run Sid Meier's Civilization, the full text in the Target box would read 'C:Program Files (x86)DOSBox-0.74DOSBox.exe' -userconf 'D:DownloadsSid-Meiers-Civilization_DOS_ENCIV.exe'
Click 'OK', rename the DOSBox shortcut to the name of your game (you can also change the icon picture in the 'Properties' window), and your game is ready to run.
How to Install Old CD-ROM Games
If you have a DOS game on CD-ROM, don’t add it to your kitschy CD wall mirror just yet, because you can install it using DOSBox.
To install a DOS-based CD-ROM game, first create the folder in Windows where you’d like to install it (we’ll use ‘c:DOSGames’ as an example), then enter the following command into DOSBox:
Next, you’ll need to mount your CD drive to DOSBox. Assuming this is drive ‘d’ on your PC, the command you need to enter into DOSBox is:
With your CD drive now mounted in DOSBox, change the active drive in DOSBox to the CD drive by entering the command ‘D:’.
On the next line, enter the command corresponding to the game installer on the CD (you may need to open the CD in File Explorer to check this, but it’s usually ‘install’, ‘setup’ or ‘dos4gw’). So, your command line should look something like:
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Finally, follow the installer instructions to install your game.
If your CD-based game is made to run with an older version of Windows, things get a bit more complicated, because old Windows installers (particularly from the ‘XP’ era and back) often aren’t compatible with modern Windows versions (as a sidenote: the few CD-based games using the SecuROM DRM won’t work in Windows 10 either. You can find a comprehensive list of these games here).
One possible solution is to run the installer as an administrator (see below). If you’re really desperate, you could run an older version of Windows in a Virtual Machine and install the game through that.
In this scenario however, we’d probably recommend just buying a digital version of the game instead, which is at the very least guaranteed to install on Windows 10. If you then have trouble actually running the game, the following tips should help.
Compatibility modes and Admin privileges
The first thing to try if your old game isn’t running in Windows 10 is to run it as an administrator.
Windows 10 has more stringent security than Windows XP, so if your game was released in 2001 or thereabouts, it may fall foul of this. The easiest workaround is to right-click the game's executable and click ‘Run as administrator’.
If that fails, it’s time to play around with the compatibility modes, which use a process called shimming to trick applications into thinking they’re running on a different Windows version.
Right-click the game executable, click 'Properties', then click the 'Compatibility' tab and tick the ‘Run this program in compatibility mode’ checkbox.
In the drop-down menu beneath that, select the Windows version that corresponds to the year in which your game was released. Gothic II, for instance, came out in 2002, so that’s why we chose Windows XP (Service Pack 3).
Open-source versions and community patches
If you’ve installed an old game from a CD, or even bought it from an online retailer, you may have been faced with such horror scenarios as being capped to 1024 x 768 resolutions, graphical oddities, or the game outright not working.
This particularly applies to post-DOS games from around the turn of the millennium, with 3D graphics designed to run on hardware and APIs that are virtually unrecognisable from those used today.
To make your old game work in Windows 10, and benefit from modern conveniences like HD resolutions, unlocked framerates, DirectX support and so on, you should check to see if there are open-source versions or community patches available for it.
For example, you can download fully functional, open-source versions of classics like Command & Conquer: Red Alert (OpenRA) and Theme Hospital (CorsixTH), complete with high resolutions, and modern, redesigned UIs.
Classic-yet-creaking games from the noughties, meanwhile, such as Gothic II, Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines and Arx Fatalis (anyone?) have been fixed and improved by years-long community patch projects.
Just look at how nice Gothic II looks running in DirectX 11 at 1080p, with dynamic lighting and shadows, and vast draw distances (follow these instructions if you want to achieve the same effect).
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Here too are the links to the Vampire: The Masquerade unofficial patch and a much-improved open-source version of Arx Fatalis, which contain years worth of bug fixes and technical improvements that modernise their respective games.
These are just specific examples, of course, but the point is that even obscure old games often have communities that are zealous enough to keep these games updated and alive.
If a group of modders love John Romero's seminal flop Daikatana enough to patch it for modern systems (yes, this is actually a thing), there's a good chance your beloved old game has received similar treatment.
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So, do some searches for ‘[your game name] unofficial patch’ and ‘[your game name] community patch’, and see what you can find. Happy hunting.
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- TechRadar's fourth annual PC Gaming Week is officially here, celebrating our passion with in-depth and exclusive coverage of PC gaming from every angle. Visit our PC Gaming Week 2018 page to see all of the coverage in one place.