>I’m collecting old PC games. I’ve been collecting them for some time, but each time I do a major hardware upgrade, or come upon games I forgot about – I like to pop them in and see what used to pass for “good”.

Over the past couple weeks I’ve tried the following:
Metal Gear Solid 2
Wing Commander Prophecy
Start Trek: Next Generation – New Worlds
Sacrifice
Mech Commander 4 – Black Knights
True Crime

I’m still installing True Crime. 4 CDs of waiting. Console games play right off the disk, but since all consoles have predicible read speed – they can do that.
Metal Gear Solid and True Crime 2 that I had way back when but the DVD I backed them up on got damaged. I was able to find Metal Gear Solid 2 on Overstock for $12 on DVD and just found True Crime at EBGames today for $4.99 on CD. Amazing what you can find when scouring the racks.

Metal Gear worked pretty well with the XBox controller, but I had to remap the trigger axis to buttons in order to use them. It still looks ok, and will play at 2560 x 1600.

Star Trek was 1024 max, and crashed right before getting to actual game play.

Sacrifice played at 2560 x 1600 and was very 3D, incredibly simple world when comparing it to today’s games. It was like a 3D Warcraft. I don’t often have the patience for RTS.

Wing Commander Prophecy required a few fan made patches, but worked quite well. The best I could hope for was a “high quality” patch, which I think brought it up to 1024 x 768, fixed the audio skipping, and removed the interlacing from the video.
Mech Warrior 4 looked a lot better then I thought it would with 1600 x 1200. The landscape was, again, really barren – and my joystick doesn’t feedback nor does it swivel left right, have a hat, or a throttle – all very useful in MW. I don’t think I’m about to go buy a new Force Feedback joystick for the game, but it was fun, and if I feel like driving a mech I just may play it again.

True Crime is… yep, you guessed it – still installing.
Maybe this will be helpful for someone wondering if they should keep their old games, or wonder how they’ll play on their new system.

I’m expecting to be able to go full res with True Crime, but something that surprised me – Battlefield 2142 runs incredibly at 2560 x 1600. I finally picked it up again after trading in my original digital download copy when it stopped being able to find the EA server regularly. It was $10 less and I now have an actual DVD.

I still had all my awards and score, so I’m not starting as a Private, makes it a lot more fun to pick up again. There are similarities to BF2, but 2142 is very well thought out. They get better with these Battlefield games every time they make a new one.