Finally, you need to create a shortcut for Halo.exe and add a line of code to the Target field to make it run at the proper resolution while downsampling is active. In GeDoSaTo's settings menu, you need to set the resolution you want to downsample from and the resolution you want to downsample to (this is your monitor's native resolution). With GeDoSaTo installed, add Halo to the application's whitelist (or run it in blacklist mode, which means it will be active for all applications except a few it has listed as off-limits). And good news: Halo CE works flawlessly with Durante's downsampling tool GeDoSaTo, which you can download here. I wasn't satisfied with running the game at 2560x1440, so I decided to downsample it. If you don't run into those problems, you should be able to boot Halo and play it at your native resolution (up to 4800x3600!) no problem. One other fix that may help you if DirectDraw fails: changing your registry settings. If acceleration is disabled, grab DXCpl from this thread and use it to re-enable hardware acceleration. You can check by running DXDiag and looking under the first Display tab. It's possible (but unlikely) that hardware acceleration is actually disabled on your computer. Even if you're not using Surround, though, you might see the same error. Best I can tell, this is an issue with Surround that I couldn't fix. A game that built a wild fan following, Halo: Combat Evolved, is the first game that hit the Halo series, and it was only one out of two games ever released on the PC. Enjoy the action of the futuristic battles of Halo on the PC. It suggested hardware acceleration might be disabled. Download the latest version of Halo for Windows. Running a multi-GPU setup on the Large Pixel Collider with Nvidia Surround, I ran into an error: the game wouldn't boot because it had trouble initializing DirectDraw. Booting the game will probably go off without a hitch for you, but it's possible you'll have trouble launching it.
Halo PC should run properly on either Windows 7 or Windows 8.