Random useful thoughts

As an extension of my post on running Unreal Tournament 2004 on Windows 10, this post is about running Serious Sam: The First Encounter and Second Encounter on the new Windows. Installation from the CD is fine, as is the patch to the latest version ( First Encounter , Second Encounter ). The biggest difficulty getting the game in a widescreen resolution. When the game runs for the first time it adds all the settings to a file: C:\Program Files (x86)\Croteam\Serious Sam\Scripts\PersistentSymbols.ini In this file set persistent extern INDEX sam_iScreenSizeJ=(INDEX)1080; persistent extern INDEX sam_iScreenSizeI=(INDEX)1920; persistent extern user FLOAT plr_fFOV=(FLOAT)105; save and exit. For me this worked without any issues for the Second Encounter, but the First Encounter had this file completely blank. It turns out that Windows does not allow the game to edit this file when it's not running in Administrator mode. To set this so that it runs in Admin mode every time right...

I am planning to play some old games with some friends, but there are some issues with new hardware. For UT2k4 when starting I get the following error: UT2004 Build UT2004_Build_[2005-11-23_16. 22] OS: Windows NT 6.2 (Build: 9200) CPU: AuthenticAMD Unknown processor @ 3506 MHz with 2047MB RAM Video: AMD Radeon HD 7700 Series (1429) LockRect failed: D3DERR_DEVICELOST History: UD3DRenderDevice::ReadPixels <- UD3DRenderDevice::Present <- UGameEngine::Draw <- UWindowsViewport::Repaint <- UWindowsClient::Tick <- ClientTick <- UGameEngine::Tick <- Level Untitled <- UpdateWorld <- MainLoop <- FMallocWindows::Free <- FMallocWindows::Realloc <- 10910191 0 FArray <- FArray::Realloc <- 0*2 <- FMallocWindows::Free This seems to be a problem with Direct3D, so to fix it open the configuration file (C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Unreal Tournament 2004\System\UT2004.ini). Under [Engine.Engine] comment out using a semi-colon ...

So I decided to upgrade my desktop to Windows 10 from 7 whilst it's free. Before the upgrade it had a dual boot with Linux Mint 17, which I had set up with the following partitions: 8Gb swap,  60Gb Linux,  60Gb Linux /home, 50Gb Windows,  322Gb shared partition. I downloaded the Windows 10 installer and started the update. The download is about 3Gb which was fine, but the first problem hit just after. The installer got stuck on "checking for updates", which after googling seems like a common problem. To fix it you have to restart windows update service by opening cmd in admin mode typing net stop wuauserv​ net start wuauserv​ I had to repeat this a few times before it finished.  The next problem was that the partition didn't have enough free space, which was a surprise as I only use Windows for games and those are on the shared partition. It turns out that although Windows 7 requires 20Gb to install, a normal install uses ~45Gb after all the updates. A...