Farewell to Microsoft Internet Games on XP, Windows ME, and Windows 7

It looks like Backgammon (and other games) didn't make it to the 22nd. The game hasn't connected here since support ended on the 14th.

I am running Pinball without a virtual machine in W-7 and W-10. No issues in both cases. As to XP in a Virtual Machine; I am using the MS created one in W-7 to load the free version of XP that I got with the VM.

Using XP in a VM on a W-7 machine is fine and allows me to run a very old, no longer available, specialized road racing timing program (NASCAR,SCCA, IMSA and NASA). Running W-7 on a Dell laptop that is not used daily. EOL for Windows 7 is not an issue here.

Only ever play some of the offline games when i'm really bored (waiting for something to load... and load... and load... and load...)

I noticed there discontinue of this service effected other games too...
Unreal Tournament 2004... exe no longer loads as is... a games shim of does kind I think was related to this service shutdown and it effected Unreal Tournament 2004..


to work around it I renamed the exe filename to append a 't' to the end of UT2004.exe so it reads as UT2004t.exe
and it works as a work around...

Microsoft said:

[I]t is with heavy hearts that we have made the difficult decision that the following games will no longer be supported

Microsoft said:

[W]e’re saddened to leave this chapter behind

Does anyone not born yesterday actually believe that they feel this way? I certainly don't.

Tharthan said:

Does anyone not born yesterday actually believe that they feel this way? I certainly don't.

Now stop that. That kind of thinking is very anti-corporate of you and affects the overall appearance of our company and what we do.

Now what have they should have done was upgraded the games and/or platform. But perhaps they have some marketing metrics there that say they weren't used very much unless you spend three quarters of your life sitting in an office cubical and wasting company time. :)