Unfortunately, Windows 10 will NOT allow you to stay off-line forever, and will demand that you reconnect to the internet and update the OS, else it will cease to function. You can only delay the inevitable. Whatever their last update has in it, trashed my SH3 & 4 on the Win10 laptop, and I cannot figure out what they did to cause that. I have not tried to play the SH5 I have on there, so I don't know about it (too busy with SH4)...
- I suspect that at its root, it has something to do with DirectX, but I don't know for certain. It's just strange that they are so bound and determined to eliminate people playing the old DirectX 9 games... All I had to do was re-install SH4 and re-do the mods and all was fine, but that was with an Intel onboard video chip. I have not gotten around to re-doing my SH3 yet, but I have three copies of it on the machine, for three different modded versions, and I do not look forward to having to re-do all of them...
As a side-note to this Fifi, I tried to create a slip-streamed copy of my Windows 7 DVD, updated with SP1 and the most recent Windows updates, and could not get that to work correctly, but I was successful in making one with just SP1 on it, which would save some time on a re-install of the OS. However, I could not get the license info to take for a Windows "authorization", so that idea has been scrapped now. Support for 7 ends shortly, and my thinking is that I'm going to now have three computers in the corners of the basement with nothing but old OSes on them with my games on them, all with disk images for restore. I've still got a box that can boot into DOS / Win95/8 for those games (with a real sound card), another with XP, and probably the third will be Win7, all isolated from the internet, but on their own private network... I am running out of "compatible" hardware for them though...
