Jeremy Duenas

love to play games. So much so that I like to do other things while I play them. For example, while playing World of Warcraft, I often have to read up on something in the WoW Wikipedia or the official site. So instead of minimizing the game, I have it set to windowed mode.

World of Warcraft has really spoiled me, because it has excellent built-in windowed mode support. But most games don’t. The other PC games I play a lot are Sim City 4 and The Sims 2. Neither of which have any built-in support for windowed mode. This is quite annoying for me, because I’m one of those people that likes keeping an eye on their buddylist, inbox, etc. So I googled around to find the answer and now I’ll share it with you. First of all, find the shortcut to the game (or the actual .exe file of the game. Either will do) and right click on the icon. Then click Properties.

On your game there should be a little box with the path to the game in it (labeled as “Target:”). At the end of the path (after the final quote mark), type -window. Then click “OK”. This only works with some games, so you might need to try just -w after the final quote instead of -window. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, just look at the above image. It’s the “final product” of this whole thing. Even with one of the two at the end of the path, it still might not work. I have no idea why, but some (maybe most) programs don’t have support for that. So if those don’t work, you can give 3D-Analyze a shot. Amongst other things, it can force games into windowed mode. To do this, unzip the files into a directory and run 3DAnalyze.exe. Then click “SELECT” and find and select the .exe for the game you want to run in windowed mode. NOTE: It HAS to be the .exe. Using the shortcut doesn’t work with this thing. After you’ve selected it, click off “Force Windowed Mode” at the bottom of the “Performance” column. Then click RUN.

This also may or may not work. But hopefully one of the two methods I’ve given will work for you. If not, actually check your game to see if it has it already. It’ll be under the graphics or display setting. I’ll be updated this article as I find new ways to force windowed mode.

Tags: Gaming, Technology, Windows, world of warcraft

This entry was posted on Friday, January 11th, 2008 at 3:54 am and is filed under Gaming, How To, Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.