Tried to run your favorite old Windows game in Windows 7, only to be met by garbaged colors and messed up graphics?

First of all, turn on the Compability settings to disable desktop composition, visual themes etc. by right clicking the executable – Selecting Properties – and selecting the Compability-tab. If it’s an old 256-color game running in 640×480 (like Diablo and Fallout), enable 256 colors and 640 x 480 resolution.

But maybe the most important setting which many overlook, is the GPU scaling setting. Intel, nVidia and ATI have GPU scaling settings in their drivers, and the default settings do not play very very well with the old 256-color games resulting in messed up colors. Disable scaling in the driver and let your display do the scaling of the picture, or enable full screen scaling (seems to work fine with most old games).

I’ve tested this (GPU scaling) on Intel, ATI and nVidia and made old games like Diablo and Fallout run without any graphical glitches.

If you want to play an old DOS game, I strongly recommend DOSBox. Many of the old adventure games like Monkey Island can be run in ScummVM.