I've been having a blast playing Deus Ex:HR lately, and it's been bringing back many fond memories of the original. The original Deus Ex is one of my favorite PC games of all time, so I decided to fire it up to see if still holds up as well as I remembered. Seems that it doesn't get along with Windows 7 64-bit too well. My XP system is down until I get a new bios chip, so no gaming on that. I couldn't get it to run in an XP VM with VirtualBox using its DirectX or OpenGL support either. Software rendering looked like crap and the mouse support was broken, so my only option was to dig into the parts bin and run the game on actual old hardware. I settled on an Athlon XP 1700+, Radeon 8500 AGP, Asus A7V133 MB, 256MB PC133, 30GB IBM "Deathstar", and Windows 2000 Pro. Even though this is ancient by today's standards, it is far beyond what was available when Deus Ex came out. One DVI to HDMI adapter later, and the game is running very smoothly using max settings at 1080p.
When I played through Deus Ex when it first came out, I was running it on an AMD K6-III 450 with an S3 Savage4. The Savage4 was a dog, so I upgraded to 2 Voodoo2s in SLI and it ran great after that. The K6-III was a nice CPU for its time also. The 256KB of on-die cache really made huge difference compared to the K6-2. If I get ambitious I might put this system back together since I still have all of these parts and archived drivers. Most of the games from that era seem to run ok on Windows 2000 also, which is good because Windows98SE totally sucks as an OS (I refuse to even consider WindowsME).
Has anybody else gone back and played the original, and if so what hardware are you running it on?
