Ask the Experts / RCT2 on new laptop (win 10)

What confuses me is that everyone has a different symptom. I can run LL just fine (albeit windowed mode) in Win10. And Gee told me yesterday his RCT2 works fine too under Win10, while I can't even launch the game.

My only guess is there could be slight differences between the publishers of the game (Infogrames, Hasbro), but I want to think that's unlikely.

I suggest using the GOG version, they clame it works on 10.

Well, on my old Win7 laptop i could even merge tracks the old way without MOM. There's indeed some weird things going on...

I'm hearing a lot of different problems concerning WX and old games. Some seem to be caused by the XboX app which is on some windows installations and which seems to want to "help" you with your games.
Other problems seem to relate to directX compatability in video drivers. some drivers dont seem to support older version that well. but that shouldn't be a problem with rct2.

Rct2 and LL are both rendered by software rendering instead of hardware so your GPU shouldn't affect it all, the difference should be in the chipset/cpu settings. I believe the new skylake processors overhauled the way onboard grafics work so you might be able to look if people who have problems are running an other type of processor then you are.
My best sugestion when using LL or Rct2 from W7 and up is to use a virtual machine in where you run the game.

The GOG version might work, but It could be trainers aren't compatibile with it, I haven't tried it.

Other problems people have with trainers etc could very well be because of programs altering the memory allocation by "optimizing" things or encrypting it. A lot of hardware vendors nowadays include stuff like this so you are more "secure" (and they can keep an eye on you). So if you have a Pre win8 machine where merging doesn't work I would sugest cleanig it completly and get a copy of windows from microsoft it self and install that to get rid of the "legal mallware" your supplier installed on it.

I know some of these words. 

ok so how do you guys put the compatibility on this because I can't even open the game...

 

Right-click your rct (or rct2) .exe and navigate to the Compatibility tab.  Change options until it works.

tried all of the variations, still get inaccesible data for some reason

Inaccessible Data File is (I think) an error in one of your .dats -try a reinstall