Combat Mission (all of 'em) and Windows 7

[Silvio Manuel]

I got into CM with CMBO and CMBB, and have been mostly way from it since around when CMAK came out.

Do any of the CM's (incl. the new Battle for Normandy) run on Windows 7? I just upgraded from XP to 7, and unfortunately didn't consider that my old games wouldn't run on my new O/S.

I looked at the various pages for the individual games but if the info is listed I wasn't able to find it.

Thanks!

[Wego McPbem]

Can't speak for the older titles but I'm running CMSF and CMBN on windows 7 with no problems.

[c3k]

If you go here, http://www.battlefront.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=51&Itemid=90 you'll see that BF.C offers a PAID option for your CMx1 games to be playable with Vista (and therefore W7). It costs $5. What are you waiting for?

(Before the flamers start, please recognize that this conversion was done by an individual. I don't care to hear the arguments that "I bought CMx1 decades ago and BF.C should support it until my great-great-grandkids are done playing with it." Suck it up, pay 5 bucks, and get on with it.)

Ken

[Ranger33]

gog.com (Good Old Games) offers a Win 7 compatible version of CMBO for $10. I don't know why BB and AK aren't on there as well, it's a pretty popular site. Their whole business model is about patching old games to work on new systems. All of their games are DRM free as well.

[altipueri]

I have the cdv 3 pack CMBO CMBB CMAK anthology and they all work on a Acer 4820T laptop with Windows 7 64 bit. The graphics is Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100.

Of course the fact it plays the old games so well also means it is really slow with the new. In fact I am playing more CMBO than CMBN because I simply find it more fun and the quick battles are, well quick.

[Schrullenhaft]

I'm not sure why CMBO didn't get a 1.04/1.13 patch like CMBB and CMAK did. The 1.04 patch for CMBB and CMAK actually addresses some issues first seen in Windows Vista that involved DirectX 10 compatible video cards (GeForce 8xxx and later or Radeon 2xxx and later). The video drivers that were published for the first 1 1/2 to 2 years for Windows Vista and DirectX 10 hardware caused problems with CMBB and CMAK where the 3D window would get covered with 'window edges' when you tried to rotate. An outside source at the time (with prior approval and access to the source code) rewrote some of the DirectX routines to use newer ones that were better supported with the DirectX 10 capable video cards and their drivers.

CMBO apparently didn't need this done since it still had a software-rendering mode (which was dropped with CMBB and CMAK, which had a higher minimum resolution requirement of 800 x 600) and there may have been a few other differences with it compared to CMBB and CMAK.

The 1.04 patch was NOT ABSOLUTELY necessary to run CMBB and CMAK under Windows Vista or Windows 7. A few months after the 1.04 patch was released both Nvidia and ATI/AMD released newer drivers that didn't have the 'rotating windows edge' issue within CM. If you had DirectX 9.0c or earlier compatible hardware, the 1.04 patch also was not necessary.

One thing about the newer DirectX routines in the 1.04 patch is that it occasionally helps with some driver releases. The current ATI/AMD Catalysts have had a 'black box' problem on the 3D screen where small, black boxes repeat themselves in a horizontal line in the 3D window. With the 1.04 patch you don't see this problem. However there's no guarantee that the 1.04 patch will address all driver problems with CMBB and CMAK, but this is one case where it does.