Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
PC Games (Games) Entertainment Games

Is DOS Gaming Dead? 146

Posted by simoniker from the barely-functioning dept.
Thanks to Monster Hardware for its article discussing the problems of getting classic DOS games working on today's state-of-the-art PCs. The author discusses trying the Microsoft Program Compatibility Wizard ("After fooling around with a number of games I was able to get a few of them half-way working"), before trying the DOSBox freeware util "...not perfect: Some games run, some games don't." After "trying and mainly failing for the last several weeks to get a handful of old DOS games... to run on a modern PC", is this author's experience typical, or are there any other ways to get old DOS titles running easily?
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Is DOS Gaming Dead? More

Is DOS Gaming Dead?

Comments Filter:

  • It's easy (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 19, 2004 @10:58PM (#8912796)
    Just install DOS and dual boot.

    • Re:It's easy (Score:5, Interesting)

      by thegrassyknowl ( 762218 ) on Monday April 19, 2004 @11:03PM (#8912828)
      Most modern PCs are too fast to satisfactorily run games - a lot of games run so fast that you've consumed all your lives and the game is over before you were even aware that it had begun.

      Old PCs are so cheap (read: free) these days. I keep an old 486 around to run the old DOS games. It's easier than jerking around with emulators, speed throttling software, non soundblaster compatible cards, etc.

      • Re:It's easy (Score:4, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 19, 2004 @11:10PM (#8912881)
        Some tools here [zophar.net] might help fix that. Try Mo'Slo or Bremze [folklora.lv]. This would keep you from having to deal with the old hardware, nice when your 486 dies and you can't replace the dead component.

      • Re:It's easy (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Jerking around with the emulators is easier for some people, because unlike old PCs, they don't take up any space! Its great if you have room for an old 486 you keep around, but I'm guessing that a lot of people like me don't. And I certainly don't want to store it in a closet somewhere and have to lug it out and wire it up just to play some Doom or SimCity 2000 (my favorite DOS games).

        • Re:It's easy (Score:5, Informative)

          by The Snowman ( 116231 ) * on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @12:37AM (#8913437)

          And I certainly don't want to store it in a closet somewhere and have to lug it out and wire it up just to play some Doom or SimCity 2000 (my favorite DOS games).

          There are plenty of source ports of Doom to modern operating systems. Besides running on both Linux and Windows, ZDoom [zdoom.org] also offers high resolutions and Quake-style key bindings. I highly recommend it.

          The Doom community is still alive and kicking after ten years. Try Doomworld [doomworld.com] and my favorite, Doom [computer.doom.playing] newsgroups [computer.doom.editing].

          • Re:It's easy (Score:3, Insightful)

            by dzym ( 544085 )
            Thanks for the plug. :)

            ZDoom is my personal favorite as well, because it is one of the few ports still under active development and is probably the most stable and fastest of them all.

            Note that ZDoom also fully supports Heretic and Hexen and a hefty portion of Strife at this point, so maybe in the future we'll be able to play Strife on recent OSes as well.

        • Re:It's easy (Score:3, Informative)

          by Incoherent07 ( 695470 )
          Oh, and since the other reply doesn't cover this, my version of Sim City 2000 works just fine on my current machine... maybe you're referring to the original Sim City?
          • Run out and buy Sim City Classic - under $10, and it's a Win16 app that works fine on the Win32 environments I've tested it on (95 and 98, though, but I will admit that it wasn't a purchased version that I used *ducks*).

            It appears to have originally been released on floppies in 1993.

        • Re:It's easy (Score:3, Interesting)

          by dzym ( 544085 )
          I highly recommend that you go out there and buy the W95 Special Edition of SimCity 2000. $9 or less, and works just fine in Win2k and XP.

          As an aside, SC2K is easily my favorite SimCity game, the more recent ones are too fiddly for my tastes.

      • Too bad VNC servers haven't made it to DOS (I guess DOS's mono-tasking nature rules that out), then you could stuff a headless 486 in a closet and run the DOS games from your actual workstation.

        Is/was there a DOS equivalent to VNC?

    • Re:It's easy (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Utopia ( 149375 )
      I still have a lot of excellent games from the DOS yore.
      For DOS games Virtual PC has been a big boon.
      No more worrying about incompatibility with present day OSes.

    • Re:It's easy (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Sure, I'll do that. Just send me a driver for my USB mouse, and I'll be happy... oh, and my USB keyboard... and my on-board soundcard (which may, or may not, perfectly emulate an old Sound Blaster...)

  • This is Typical (Score:5, Interesting)

    by vga_init ( 589198 ) on Monday April 19, 2004 @11:05PM (#8912844) Journal
    It's actually quite surprising how support for old DOS games has been difficult to manage. With all of the information available on the subject, one would think that it's more simplistic and straightforward. After all, the hardware that these games was designed to work with was extremely limited, and there just wasn't enough plurality to suggest that a game required a feature of functionality that was so uncommon.

    Granted, there probably were strange things that need to be addressed, but you'd figure that it shouldn't take *that* much to work out. And, of course, there is no doubt that they will eventually.

    DOSBox is a great program, and it has worked wonders for me with regards to some of the more ancient games, but you can forget about using it to play the most recent DOS games. I have only used the Windows port of it, but the VM just wasn't fast enough to handle some of the fancier games, which was too bad. Even then, some older games don't work. Support is just across the board.

    I approach DOS emulation with the same attitude that I approach WINE with; if your program works, then that's awesome! It will undoubtedly work well and you'll have a blast. Of course, there is a good chance that your program won't actually work (at least, not right away). Too bad for you.

    In the end, there is just no substitute for the original machines available today. Maybe tomorrow.

    • I too have found problems with DOS games not working on my newer systems. Another problem I've encountered is that when older games do work, they sometimes run extremely fast - I'm no expert, but I suppose they weren't designed with anything faster than a 486 in mind (if that, in many cases). I have never run DOSBox, however. Simple solution: My family still has a 386 running DOS and Windows 3.11, so we play older games on that machine. We use a slightly newer machine (a Pentium 166) with Windows 95 to run

      • To speed up DOSBox (Score:4, Informative)

        by zhiwenchong ( 155773 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @12:47AM (#8913488)
        You can tweak the speed by pressing F11, F12, Ctrl-F11, Ctrl-F12 or some suchkeys. The default DOSBox runs slowly because it is constrained to using x cycles. You CAN make it faster by giving it more cycles and by lowering the framerate.

        It's mentioned somewhere in the docs that are included in the zip.

      • Re:This is Typical (Score:3, Interesting)

        by mahdi13 ( 660205 )
        I switch between DOSBox [sourceforge.net] and DOSemu [dosemu.org] with a Win95 boot disk
        These two projects should really merge since one has some things working and the other has other things working. DOSBox is a lot easier to set up and get running, but I've found DOSemu to be more 'flowing'.
      • I feel like a parrot here, but DOSBox really is great for this sort of thing, just make sure you tweak the cycles. Also, it helps to have task manager up while doing this, if you get to the point that your processor is pegged out, raising the cycles in DOSBox is not going to help anymore, and may work backwards. If you get to that point and still aren't running fast enough, then you are stuck, as your processor isn't fast enough to do the emulation. Though, if you still have an old box running, and don't
      • does anyone know where I can get a drive
        Try eBay. [http]

  • Not just DOS games (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Toxygen ( 738180 ) on Monday April 19, 2004 @11:08PM (#8912863) Journal
    I remember trying to get Porsche Unleashed working on win2k after I upgraded from win98. I eventually did get it to work, but only after a few patches and even still it wouldn't run nearly as well as it did on the older OS (and hardware too, I might add). I've also got a few DOS emulators that refuse to work under XP, but they'll run fine on other windows systems.

    It's a kick in the ass for sure, and I (we) seem to be in the minority, but I think there's a fine kind of satisfaction with the intricately simple games of old that's being lost in the modern age.
  • I recently revived my old 486 and even that just runs some games way too fast to play... at 66Mhz. Scorched Earth, anyone?

  • You can find it googling, but here it is anyway... (Score:5, Informative)

    by GoRK ( 10018 ) on Monday April 19, 2004 @11:11PM (#8912890) Homepage Journal
    A few ways I know of that work pretty well:

    1) DOSBox is a really good dos environment. I have no idea how old the article submitters "really old" games are, exactly, but they'd have to be pretty new to have a problem on DOSBox. It can even run Windows 3.1. I'm betting pretty hard on a misconfiguration here. It has Linux compatiblity, too! (And OS/X using bochs cores for the diehard folks out there)

    2) VDMSound can be used to emulate legacy sound hardware in the NT (2000,XP) VDM. A lot of games too new to really run well in DOSBox but require legacy sound support that is not provided while in windows may find it helpful.

    3) Dual boot DOS! Scary, yes, and it usually requires a REAL legacy (or compatible) soundblaster to make work, but obviously it yields very nice results with more recent DOS titles.

    4) DOS in VMWare. VMWare will emulate legacy soundblaster 16 hardware, so a lot of dos games will work great here. It's more heavyweight than DOSBox, but it also costs some money.. So it might not really be worth it just to play a game or two...

    Anyway, that's about it... If you are really dedicated, just go to a comptuer swap meet and build yourself a DOS game rig out of some old 486 or something. It probably wouldn't cost you more than $50 for a decent setup (P66 - P100) machine and you could maybe even swing a PCI bus!

    ~GoRK

    • Re:You can find it googling, but here it is anyway (Score:4, Informative)

      by Wildfire Darkstar ( 208356 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @12:43AM (#8913471)
      DOSBox is great, and improving all the time, but it's a bit of a nightmare to configure. Which, I mean, shouldn't be too much of a problem: chances are, if you've enough computer experience to know how to get an old DOS game running, you're probably proficient enough to muck around for a moment in a few config files to, say, get ioctl CD-ROM extensions working to run World of Xeen (or whatever).

      VDMSound, on the other hand, has never worked particularly well for me. I get the feeling I'm in the minority here, though. And dual-booting DOS still tends to work the best: even some of the more modern PCI soundcards still have DOS drivers available. Yeah, they're often a bit kludgy and lack a lot of the features of a true old-school ISA SB16, but they get the job done. I know that Audigy cards up through the Audigy 2 have the drivers in question (and maybe later versions, too: I've never bothered to look).

      DOSBox is my preferred solution. If you know what you're doing, it can handle most of what you can throw at it, and it offers a better set of features than any of the other solutions. Sure, it's never going to be as perfect as a true old school rig, but it's often a lot more convenient.
    • Perhaps you can answer this, but I've been trying to get an old game (Archon Ultra, sort of a combination of chess, an RPG and a fighting game) on xp or linux. I've tried dosbox in xp, and dosemu on linux, but neither of them seem to work with the dos4gw loader that enables the software to run in protected mode on the x86. I'm out of ideas, and I'd really like to play that game - thoughts?
      • Well, DosBox isn't quite to that point yet-- 386 emulation is still pretty preliminary. Give it six months to a year and it's likely it'll be ready to run Archon Ultra and the like. It does already run a number of games from that era, but support is hit-or-miss.
      • Yeah it's that 386 protected mode that is really the problem with dosbox or dosemu... They are coming along though. The NTVDM should be able to deal with dos4gw when running in fullscreen, so perhpas VDMSound would be all you need. Short of that, it'd be VMware or VirtualPC (as another reply suggested has better video support than VMWare for DOS) which should definately run it.

    • Re:You can find it googling, but here it is anyway (Score:4, Informative)

      by default luser ( 529332 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @05:12PM (#8922071) Journal
      Dual boot DOS! Scary, yes, and it usually requires a REAL legacy (or compatible) soundblaster to make work, but obviously it yields very nice results with more recent DOS titles.

      Easier said than done successfully. Newer hardware is getting a little antsy under DOS, and it's no longer as easy to get things running perfectly.

      Take this for instance: I own an original Ensoniq AudioPCI (circa 1997), the consumer market's first PCI sound card. It had flawless emulation of Soundblaster Pro, as well as decent MT32 emulation. In fact, for the longest time they had the ONLY working legacy emulation over PCI (which is why Creative acquired them).

      This card has worked with all my old DOS titles on two previous motherboards, but on my current motherboard it has issues. I imagine it may have something to do with the extended interrupt space (I've noticed this board supports 32 interrupts under 2k), or perhaps people have just chosen to forget that certain DOS I/O regions were ever reserved. Anyway, I get bad sound on many old games, most notably Privateer. It makes me want to just sit back and bide my time until DOSBOX catches up with the times.

      Also, I've seen some posts on here bashing VDM Sound, but it's actually very effective. The console under NT / 2k / XP is actually a full-fledged DOS emulator, and works quite well. The only reasons people have problems is because it doesn't support sound, port access, and / or a few stranger video modes.

      For example, VDM Sound + 2k console will play Master of Orion just fine, but say Star Control II has an issue with the graphics rendering painfully slow. It's hit-or-miss, but it works surprisingly well.

      Oh yeah, I thought I might add this, because I discovered it years ago and it's all but forgotten now: for those of you who loved The Seventh Guest, Trilobyte released an unsupported Win95 launcher for the game many moons ago that you may be able to find on Google...or I could just serve it somewhere and post a link here if anyone is interested...
      • For example, VDM Sound + 2k console will play Master of Orion just fine, but say Star Control II has an issue with the graphics rendering painfully slow. It's hit-or-miss, but it works surprisingly well.

        You probably shouldn't be using a dos-box to play Star Control II [sourceforge.net] when there's Windows/Linux/OSX versions available.

        • Ahh, but I have.

          The Ur-Quan Masters is a nice port, but whenI tried it it lacked that ... "feel".

          The 3DO code porting project is actually the closest you can get without DOS or DOSBOX, and even that doesn't feel quite right because they added various features to the 3DO port.

          Yeah, I'm nit-picky. I want to play the game exactly as I remember it :P
      • With your soundcard there, it's most likely all the PCI bridges getting in the way of the IRQ routing. DOS has no real support for a modern APIC and the bios support for this kind of thing is falling behind because it's really unnecessary for doing anything but running a legacy OS like DOS...

  • The easy way (Score:4, Interesting)

    by _Sexy_Pants_ ( 703751 ) on Monday April 19, 2004 @11:11PM (#8912891)
    And the way that I'm just about to start, is find, or build, a DOS only machine. Grab a copy of win95 or 98, find a good 200mhz, and you're off. A good video card isn't really needed, since most 3d acceleration is windows-based, but a good old soundcard won't be too hard to find. You'll soon be playing Duke Nukem all night
    • Grab a copy of win95 or 98, find a good 200mhz, and you're off.
      Heh. This is exactly what I ended up doing in order to play some old Might & Magic games. Before that, I tried using DOSBox, FreeDOS, and even VMWare - for different reasons, none worked out for me. Turned out it was overall easier to just grab an old machine and throiw DOS on it.

      • Re:The easy way (Score:2, Insightful)

        by AKnightCowboy ( 608632 )
        Turned out it was overall easier to just grab an old machine and throiw DOS on it.

        But how do you connect it to the Internet to download patches for the game? ;-)

        Ah, the days when companies actually took the time to make the game halfway usable before shipping it in a box. Now they ship it broke and make you patch it before playing it. I blame Doom for starting that trend with the different versions of the shareware game.

    • Re:The easy way (Score:3, Informative)

      by bishiraver ( 707931 )
      No, a lot of old games (Ultima Underworld especially) will not run in a win95/win98 environment. Any game that has special DOS memory requirements will not run in a win95/win98 environment, and as such this solution should be shunned.
      • You can run them if you install Dos before installing Win 95 or 98 and logout to dos. That was the last time I was able to get my SSI games to work.

        World of Xeen, Eye of Beholder I & II, and quite a few of the "gold box" games.

        It is easier to get an old PC and use an AB box for the monitor, keyboard and mouse.

  • Depends on the game. (Score:5, Informative)

    by bluephone ( 200451 ) <grey@nOspAm.burntelectrons.org> on Monday April 19, 2004 @11:13PM (#8912899) Homepage Journal
    Games like Doom, old Sierra adventures, Maniac Mansion and othe rSCUMM games, they can all run on todays PC, albeit with help. DOOM/Quake/Hexen have lots of open source engines based on the open code, and support many newer features making the games look even better. Sierra games, like the Space Quest games, Leisure Suit Larry, and other Sierra SCI-based games also have new engines for modern PCs, although they've been reverse engineered, since they're closed source.

    I have found the FreeSCI [linuxgames.com] being the best for Sierra games, and it's available for Win32, Macs, Linux, DEC Alpha, etc. Same with Maniac Manson, Beneath a Steel Sky, and other SCUMM based games (lots of lucas Arts games). ScummVM [scummvm.org] is a fantastic, widely compatible engine for LucasArts and other SCUMM based games, and is also available for a host of formats. To boot, two different games are freely available for it, Beneath a Steel Sky, and Flight of the Amazon Queen (both are in the floppy version, and the full CD ROM version with voice audio! Beneath A Steel Sky will NOT disappoint, play it!).

    The Z-Machine engine for Zork has been ported to everything known to man, and some things not known to man, so that's widely playable.

    Lastly, for those niche games that you love (Epic Pinball, Jill of the Jungle!) try a virtual machine system, like VMware (the best, IMHO), Microsoft's newly aquired and freshly released Virtual PC 2004 (not as good, IMHO, and not available on Linux, obviously), or some other open source projects might work.

    The last gasp is to install a copy of DOS or Win9x on a spare small partition (Mine's a half gig bootable partition on my second drive), and boot from it for really cranky stuff. This only works, mind you, if your sound card has some form of DOS based drivers/emulation drivers available. I have a Creative branded Ensoniq Audio PCI, and while I have the DOS drivers, they're a bitch to find now, and I keep them very safe. I've found that Demos and Intros are most likely to fail. I can't get Future Crew's Second Reality running with sound under anything but real DOS.

    This is also another good reason to kep an old Sound Blaster 16 lying around. God knows they're plentiful enough and cheap, so no true old school hard core gamer/geek shouldn't have one. :)

    • I was able to get 2nd Reality to work on DOSBox without much configuration (though I believe I was using Gravis emulation).

      Have you tried 2nd Reality with the newer version of DOSBox?

  • VirtualPC (Score:5, Informative)

    by Arkham ( 10779 ) on Monday April 19, 2004 @11:15PM (#8912915)
    VirtualPC, on either a Mac or a PC, is perfect for this. Performance is adequate for DOS games, and you can install whatever DOS/Win3.1 OS you might want/need for the game to run properly.
    • I've actually found performance on the plus side of excessive for DOS games. Games like Populous, the Ultima Series, and Scorched Earth are impossible to play, thanks to the lack of any kind of speed throttle. Superheroes League of Hoboken seems okay so far, though.

      Yeah, who'd'a thought VPC would run too fast on a Mac, but I've never seen W95 run as fast as it does on this 1.25 Ghz Powerbook. Of course this IS unix; maybe I should throw a renice 20 at it.

  • DOSEmu for Linux (Score:3, Redundant)

    by OneFix ( 18661 ) on Monday April 19, 2004 @11:16PM (#8912920)
    DOSEmu [dosemu.org] works with both FreeDOS and M$-DOS. I haven't seen much that it won't actually run...

    • Re:DOSEmu for Linux (Score:4, Informative)

      by Per Wigren ( 5315 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @02:17AM (#8913852) Homepage
      DOSEmu is a LOT faster than DOSBox, but it really sucks att emulating soundcards.. You won't get sound in many games in DOSEmu..

      My biggest hope for the future is QEmu [bellard.free.fr]! Its emulation is so fast it's silly and it has support for many different CPUs and eventually it'll even be able to run MacOS X on a PC. :)
      • Have you tried the new 1.2 releases? They really improve the sound support a lot.
        • Yes. 1.2 still doesn't emulate ADLib, MIDI or any of the more advanced Sound Blaster features. DOSBox emulates almost all SB-tricks, ADLib, ADLib Gold, Gravis Ultrasound Max, Roland MT-32 and much more...

          Almost all games (atleast in the graphical adventure genre) uses ADLib/MIDI to play sound...

  • Multiplayer (Score:4, Informative)

    by Gamelore ( 570005 ) on Monday April 19, 2004 @11:20PM (#8912945)
    DOSbox is wonderful for old modem games. I recently played a virtual modem game of WarCraft against myself on the same PC running WinXP.

    You can also play modem games with people across the Internet, by having the game "dial" their IP, which is intercepted by DOSbox and a TCP/IP connection is set up between the 2 players.

    Nothing beats watching a naive old program dialing away the tones of an IP address.

  • My money's on emulators like DOSBox; if the beloved Atari ST [atari.st] and Amiga [linux.de] can live on, then by gum, we're not going to lose Wing Commander, Ultima Underworld, or Starflight, either.

    Isn't it only a matter of time before my PC can achieve the (arguably ridiculous, but surely wonderful) ability to emulate its 486-based ancestors at speed?

  • Win95 game. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Jeffool ( 675688 )
    Speaking of playing slightly older games, I find it a pain to run even Win95 games. Two that spring to mind are Rocket Jockey, which won't even install, and Grim Fandango, which is constantly freezing while it searches the disc. Is there anyway to install these on the harddrive in XP, that anyone could help my dumbass with?
  • Nothing is stopping you from dual booting say winXP and win98(with it's associated dos). Win98 sp2 cds are easy to come by dirt cheap or free. If you had an older computer you probably still have them lying around, and it's still all over the p2p networks.

    In my experience, you can chop a lot of crap out of win98 and fit it in a fairly small partition (people have fit it into like 30 megs). Just don't use NTFS for any partition you need to access from win98. Set up XP or 2k for dual boot and set 98 to go
    • If you are going this route, you may as well actually use MS-DOS 6.22, rather than Win98. Although you will most likely have better luck getting old DOS games running under Win9x than under WinXP, depending on the game and your hardware you may still have problems. On of the major problems I remember having with DOS games under Win98 was with sound: the SoundBlaster drivers that came with my SB Live! could work either with win32 (Win9x+), or DOS, but not both at the same time. So in order to get sound wo
      • You can always do what I do: gut a Win98 install for the DOS system files. Use a Win98 boot disk or CD to get a command prompt, and format a partition with the neccessary system files (format x: /s). Tends to cooperate a little better with more recent systems, you don't need to track down DOS install floppies, and it doesn't come with all the system program cruft that a full DOS install would. Search Google for the most essential drivers (CTMOUSE, SHSUCDX, for light-weight mouse and CD-ROM drivers that supp
    • I know I can't run Win98 on my machine... I've got a gig of RAM... and Windows 98 can't support that much memory. Nothing but BSOD errors over and over...

      Nephilium

  • No (Score:1, Insightful)

    by lightspawn ( 155347 )
    Here's a hint. Whenever a NEWS article ends with a question mark, the answer is no. News is about reporting things that happen, not asking if something's happened or not.

    Shouldn't that be in 'ask slashdot'?

    Coming soon: Is FTP dead?

    • Re:No (Score:4, Funny)

      by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @01:08AM (#8913593) Homepage Journal
      "Here's a hint. Whenever a NEWS article ends with a question mark, the answer is no. News is about reporting things that happen, not asking if something's happened or not."

      Games [slashdot.org]: Is nitpicking the definition of 'news' dead?

      PC Games (Games) [slashdot.org] | Posted by simoniker on Monday April 19, @07:57PM from the people-never-stop-bitching-dept.

      NanoGator asks: "Is it really appropriate to mod nitwits up for complaining about the questions sometimes posted to Slashdot?" Well NanoGator does have a point. For some reason, there are a lot of people here who don't quite understand the concept that Slashdot is a suitable place for discussion as well as the reporting of news. Could this be the end of Microsoft as we know it?
  • I'm curious because i've been very fortunate with what little DOS-era gaming I still do. Quite a lot of older games I still have sitting around just seem to work under WinXP. Sure, some of them might take a bit of fiddling to set up, and a few won't play their craptastic MIDI music, but on the whole I've managed to get pretty much everything working one way or another. The biggest problem is that a few games seem to randomly crash while loading (Dune 2 and Colonization come to mind), but they're kind of lik
    • I spent a good long time trying to get TIE FIghter Collector's Edition working in XP over this last week. I think that's the closest thing I've had to a 'horror story.'

      Ultimate solution? Get TIE Fighter 95 instead. Still needs some fixing, but definitely not difficult.

      In a lot of cases, especially in later games, there are Win95 versions that are much easier to get working. You mentioned Colonization, and I know that's an example.
    • Off the top of my head :

      Doom 2
      Dune 2
      X-Com (or whatever you wanna call it)
      Warcraft 1 (you've come a long way Blizzard...)
      The original Command and Conquer (farewell Westwood)
      Commander Keen 1 + 4 (id Software BEFORE Doom)
      Ultima 4
      X-Wing Alliance (rebought it recently in a beat up, damaged by water, ripped box for $2 USD... before discount)
      Tie Fighter
      Leisure Suit Larry 1-3
      Space Quest 1-4
      Quest for Glory 1-3 (mmm... Sierra adventure games...)
      Wing Commander 1 + 2 as well as expansion packs (still looking

      • I play Master of Magic in DOSBox, and I assure you that the slow, slow feel is still very much there.

        I have X-Com running just fine in WinXP, incidentally. In fact, a little better than it ran back when I first played it.
        • Master of Magic runs fine on all versions of Windows, and in DOSEmu, as long as you don't care about sound. Not too fast or too slow, either.

          Man I wish someone would finish a Win32 (or Linux) port of that game! Even screen-scraping it to handle high-res graphics would be awesome. It really is right at the top of my personal "best games" list. I still play daily.
      • As a commited UFO (aka X-Com) fan I can confirm that it runs perfectly under DosBox. Didn't even require any tinkering with the configuration.
      • but without the slow, paced feel of an slow, slow computer; it just doesn't seem right. And yes I do have a seperate computer set aside to play just these old games. Two computers actually.

        I've actually found slow gameplay to be one of the less enjoyable aspects of playing the older games.

        Recently I've been playing a lot of 80s/90s titles on Amiga and Atari emulators(Mostly because I can't download good PC titles any more because of the money grubbing bastards who are taking them off the abandonware list
  • The current state of DOS gaming is iffy at best. With some of the sleeper hits holding abandonware [the-underdogs.org] status, one can get by. But the classics like Duke Nukem remain licensed (until DK: Forever comes out [read: never]). The "romz" scene is full of sketchy websites that are supported by links to innapropriate content and viruses.

    Does anybody know a good virtual source for the real great classics (if not a phsyical dealer?)

  • DOS Box (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Malketh ( 230636 )
    Out of all the things I've tried (VMWare, DOSEmu, FreeDOS, etc) the only way I've been able to get dos titles working perfectly is on old hardware with straight DOS. It's sad, but nothing else works well. I'm lucky in the fact I've got an old P200 with a serial mouse and ISA SoundBlaster card just for that purpose. Biggest pain though is VMWare don't even bother.

  • Transport Tycoon with DOSEmu (Score:3, Informative)

    by linuxkrn ( 635044 ) <gwatson@lRASPinuxlogin.com minus berry> on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @12:03AM (#8913245)
    I wrote a quick how-to a while ago with Transport Tycoon [linuxlogin.com]. I still play DOS games every now and then. Some of the classics just haven't been replaced. And yes, I know aobut simutrans, but it's no where near as good as the original.

  • What old DOS games did you play that were easy? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by superultra ( 670002 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @01:11AM (#8913609) Homepage
    are there any other ways to get old DOS titles running easily?

    Were they ever easy to run? I remember having multiple floppies for multiple autoexec.bat and config.sys configurations. Wing Commander; good god, was that a pain to deal with. I remember spending at least a good hour trying to get the right about of base memory to run X-Wing.

    I think people forget just how much windows 95 changed gaming. The better the games, it seemed, the harder it was to get those suckers to run. The problem wasn't even having enough hardware to run it (although that was part of it). Most of the problem came from needing base memory to load mouse and sound drivers, but then the game always requiring some minimum amount of memory to run. I can't tell you how many times I saw something along the lines of:
    "This program needs 514K free to run. You have 512K free."
    If I had a special button on my keyboard that automatically entered memcheck /c, I would have shaved at least a half a year off my life.
    • Heh...had to respond to your post. Dead God did Privateer suck for that reason. I basically had a floppy labeled "Privateer Boot Disk" because of all the memory fixes you had to do...loading sound drivers and such into himem. I don't remember the problems with XWing so much, that game just loaded right up for me.

      --trb
    • Damn, I had finally fogotten about all those hours spent, just trying to find a few loose kilobytes of memory. I think, for a lot of people, like myself, DOS gaming has taken on a bit of that nostolgic aspect, in that, we remember the hours of fun spent playing games like Priviteer, and have forgotten the hours of frustration of staring at MEM for that last K or two of memory. Though, if nothing else, you tended to learn a lot about how to get the most out of DOS by doing that.

    • "This program needs 514K free to run. You have 512K free."

      512K free is a bit on the low side - I've usually experienced around 580-600K because of UMBs and HMA. Are you sure you're stripped to the bare minimum?

      In any case, conventional memory requirements was beginning to be a little rediculous even after Windows 95 was released. Games were beginning to require 590K of memory for full functionality (or sometimes any) and it was almost always an extremely tight fit. There wasn't any excuse either since

  • Wait a second... (Score:3, Funny)

    by SpecialKae ( 769783 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @01:30AM (#8913693)
    doesn't everybody keep those old 486's around just for that?

  • Get another box (Score:4, Insightful)

    by dacarr ( 562277 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @02:25AM (#8913874) Homepage Journal
    No, really. Dig out that old 486 box with DOS 6.22, or OpenDOS 7 (remember, DR DOS people have nothing to do with the litigious bastards [sco.com]), or whatever version of DOS you have around, and let it run. Hell, it might even work in OS/2 or something.

  • I'm reading all these posts. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Inoshiro ( 71693 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @03:08AM (#8914035) Homepage
    Yet I see no mention of DOSEmu [dosemu.org].

    DOSEmu is wicked. It's great. It's not VMWare (no $$ required), it's not Windows (no $$ to MS), it's not BOCHS (so it runs decently). I've used it with many DOS games.

    It comes with FreeDOS, but I was able to easily put the Win95 command.com version 7 in with some other tweaks to make an easy-to-use DOS enviroment I've used to play through many Sierra and Lucas Arts adventure games.

    The support is a lot more complete than, say, Wine, because all it has to do is provide a virtualized x86, which is what the OS and hardware are built to provide anyways. Most of it is just a thin BIOS compatibility layer. It's no where near as complex as a whole DirectX translator :)

    Try it out. It's quick and easy to install, and is fairly mature. It'll run a lot.

  • There are MANY ways to still play DOS games. (Score:3, Informative)

    by Domini ( 103836 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @07:05AM (#8914785) Journal
    Many DOS games work well in NT4/200/XP (NT from now on) since NT supports setting of memeory and performance options. But if this does not work, I've used VMWare with great success, but you can use DOSbox, Bocsh, VirtualPC or any other of choice.

    If this fails, you will find that there are many emulators out there for specific games (as well as full remakes). These include z-code (Infocom) interpreters, ScummVMs, etc. Re-makes include things like Defender of the Crown, Ur-Quan Master etc...

    Nope, the DOS games that were popular cannot die.

    No need to fret about it.
  • DOS gaming works ok. Things like quest for glory work great in dosbox. Some games like Descent just work in windows xp without any help. But some games just wont go. I've been trying to make Mechwarrior 2 work in XP for months, still no go. I can get it to run, but as soon as it gets to the point where the real game starts it hangs up. Other problems I have are playing old Windows 95 era games. Stuff like Red Alert and the original GTA. Having two monitors and a dual head video card really screw these game

    • Re:its ok... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by ReKleSS ( 749007 )
      Firstly... you've never tried porting old dos games (or even strangely written linux games) to more modern operating systems, have you? If you're lucky, it won't require much more effort than rewriting minor graphics, sound and input routines, but if not, it can get very troublesome. Now, regarding GTA: Rockstar re-released it for free. It's about a 100mb download. It works okay under win XP and win2k, but works much better under linux/winex :p Anyway, if you can, try this stuff under WineX. It seems to ha
    • I tried to get Mechwarrior 2: Mercs running on XP once. What I found was a statement from the publisher and many of the fans that said, "This game WILL NOT run under WinNT, Win2K, or WinXP."

      That was a huge kick in the ass.

  • Rule # 1 (Score:4, Informative)

    by mnmn ( 145599 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @08:52AM (#8915298) Homepage
    The first rule is to have an ISA soundblaster card. Theres no substitution for this. All soundblaster emulation drivers break under DOS games, many of which cannot be run under a DOS box in win9x or DOS emulation in win2k.

    I ran some games like civilization under vmware and bochs, using MSDOS 6.22 floppies. They couldnt be run under dosemu, or win2k, or winxp, or win9x, or freedos. Many motherboards still come with one ISA slot which can be useful either for hardware modems or an isa soundblaster card for DOS games.

    If a console vendor releases GBA-style console with these old games (and maybe genesis and snes, and c64 and atari2600) games, the console will sell more than GBA itself. I'd much rather play a game I used to play a long time ago than try a new one out.

  • Specs for a retro-gaming PC (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Duranki ( 772865 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2004 @09:34AM (#8915728) Homepage
    This has been on my mind the last few weeks, and this topic is as good a place to post as any. What are the ideal specs for a classic DOS gaming machine? By reading these posts I've gathered the following: either a 486 or P200, loaded with DOS 6.22 and an ISA SoundBlaster 16 card. What about RAM? Lord, how embarrassing...I started off with an old 386SX-16 and worked my way up, but it's been years since I ran any of these games. Anyone care to post their optimal DOS gaming specs? Thanks.

  • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • My biggest problem with DOS games (even when actually running in DOS) is that many old games don't work with my current hardware.
    The main problem I've found is that I have a USB mouse. Well there are no USB DOS drivers so I can't use a mouse

    A second problem I've had is that old games that use [url=http://www.scitechsoft.com/products/ent/free _ titles.html]Scitech's Display Doctor's univbe[/url] VESA TSR don't work because the modern graphic chips (like my ATI Radeon which supports Vesa 3.0) aren't sup
  • Windows 2003 actually runs DOS code nativly.

    A good example is Master of Orion 2.
    The DOS version runs nativly on Windows 2003 without even having to set the "run under ___" feature.. AND it runs faster and smoother than the Windows version.
  • I'm sure most of you familiar with old DOS games remember making the boot floppies to get many of these games to run. So how feasable would it be to make a bootable DOS CD with a bunch of games on there? I'm sure there'd still be speed issues with newer PCs, and of course you can't save to the CD. Has anyone ever tried this?

    • Using a CDRW, ramdisk, dos cd burning software and DJGPP compiled version of mkisofs. It can work. After the game had exited, recreate the isoimage, blank and write back to the cdrw. Worked quite well once I had DOS configured correctly for the games.
  • Considering I'm working on a 600mhz, I kind of find it depressing that the author of the article refer to an 'old' computer as a 1GHZ...

    My computer is too fast to run certain games... won't a 1GHZ be waaayyy too fast?
  • http://www.angelfire.com/realm/zeroone/

  • There's a legend that back in the day, Microsoft representative was enthusiastically babbling how well Windows 95 will preserve DOS compatibility and you can easily run most of the DOS games right off the desktop without dual-booting. Then someone from the crowd just asked "How about Ultima VII?" Without bothering to make excuses, the rep just admitted that U7 still doesn't work that easily. =)

    These days, U7 is nothing more than a nightmare with which to scare DOS emulator authors. For playing the game, t

    • Funny, I got U7 up and running on my girlfriend's computer with a minimum of fuss. Used DOSBox, and the CPU is only a 1Ghz P3. Granted, with the system you are running, it may not run fast enough, as I recall my g/f's CPU was pretty much pegged, in order to get U7 running at a good speed, so it may just be time for you to upgrade, to get those old games running right.

  • Get a virtual machine (I recomend VMware). Then install DOS on it and everything should run fine :D

Slashdot Top Deals

Our OS who art in CPU, UNIX be thy name. Thy programs run, thy syscalls done, In kernel as it is in user!

Close