For fun I decided can an old 95 / 98 game work on 2008. I decided to see if Earthworm Jim would function. It will install / run however you get a

vids:iv32 decompressor error when launching the game. To resolve this for this game and a few other older games that rely on this codec you need to do the following

1. Copy ir32_32.dll from a WinXP machine to c:\windows\system32
2. Create the following registry key

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Drivers32]

Create a Reg_SZ vidc.iv32 with the value ir32_32.dll

This is an intel codec no longer available for free is my understanding from some searches I did.

So far it is working fine and an old vintage purchase survives OS upgrade 4...

I have had a few people email me about difficulty creating the registry key required. I am attaching a zip file with the REG file and the DLL itself.

If you unzip the file, copy the DLL to C:\windows\system32

Then double click on the REG file and allow to import it should work. I did a direct extract and tested on a VM...