figured it out! singe/American laser games work by a .bat file. game executes a shortcut to the .bat file. for some reason when I created the shortcuts years ago the file lets say mad dog.bat the shortcut was named the same mad dog.bat but it is a .lnk file. regular game ex had no problem with those but I noticed it displayed in the game selection the name had the .bat in it so I renamed the shortcut removing the .bat and they all work. strange but I don't care it works