Is DOS Gaming Dead? 146
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?
It's easy (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:It's easy (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
Re:It's easy (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It's easy (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It's easy (Score:5, Informative)
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)
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)
Re:It's easy (Score:2)
It appears to have originally been released on floppies in 1993.
Re:It's easy (Score:3, Interesting)
As an aside, SC2K is easily my favorite SimCity game, the more recent ones are too fiddly for my tastes.
VNC would make it easier (Score:2)
Is/was there a DOS equivalent to VNC?
Re:Wrong if it was properly programmed... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:It's easy (Score:3, Interesting)
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)
This is Typical (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:This is Typical (Score:2, Interesting)
To speed up DOSBox (Score:4, Informative)
It's mentioned somewhere in the docs that are included in the zip.
Re:This is Typical (Score:3, Interesting)
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'.
Re:This is Typical (Score:2)
Re:This is Typical (Score:2)
Not just DOS games (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
some don't run well even on retro hardware (Score:1)
Re:some don't run well even on retro hardware (Score:1)
Re:some don't run well even on retro hardware (Score:1)
Re:some don't run well even on retro hardware (Score:3, Informative)
Scorched 3D [scorched3d.co.uk]
You can find it googling, but here it is anyway... (Score:5, Informative)
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)
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.
Re:You can find it googling, but here it is anyway (Score:2, Informative)
> nightmare to configure.
Have you used any of the GUI front ends they link to on the download page. They make DOSBox much simpler, but are available on Windows only, from what I saw. I prefer D-Fend [members.home.nl].
Re:You can find it googling, but here it is anyway (Score:2)
Re:You can find it googling, but here it is anyway (Score:2)
Re:You can find it googling, but here it is anyway (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You can find it googling, but here it is anyway (Score:4, Informative)
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...
Re:You can find it googling, but here it is anyway (Score:2)
You probably shouldn't be using a dos-box to play Star Control II [sourceforge.net] when there's Windows/Linux/OSX versions available.
Re:You can find it googling, but here it is anyway (Score:2)
The Ur-Quan Masters is a nice port, but whenI tried it it lacked that
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
Re:You can find it googling, but here it is anyway (Score:2)
Re:You can find it googling, but here it is anyway (Score:2)
Anyway, vmware/vpc/plex86 hardly introduce any more overhead than the context switching required of any other 'normal' process on the host OS. It would be more fair to say that they slow down IO while the CPU runs pretty close to normal speed.
The easy way (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The easy way (Score:2)
Re:The easy way (Score:2, Insightful)
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)
Re:The easy way (Score:1)
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)
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. :)
2nd Reality on DOSBox (Score:1)
Have you tried 2nd Reality with the newer version of DOSBox?
Re:2nd Reality on DOSBox (Score:1)
VirtualPC (Score:5, Informative)
Re:VirtualPC (Score:2)
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)
Re:DOSEmu for Linux (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:DOSEmu for Linux (Score:1)
Re:DOSEmu for Linux (Score:2)
Almost all games (atleast in the graphical adventure genre) uses ADLib/MIDI to play sound...
Multiplayer (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Multiplayer (Score:2, Funny)
As dead or alive as Atari or Amiga games are. (Score:2)
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)
Re:Win95 game. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Win95 game. (Score:1)
Re:Yes... (Score:1)
If you want actual Dos for perfect compatability.. (Score:2, Informative)
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
Re:If you want actual Dos for perfect compatabilit (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:If you want actual Dos for perfect compatabilit (Score:3, Informative)
Well... unless you've got a a lot of RAM (Score:1)
Nephilium
Re:Well... unless you've got a a lot of RAM (Score:2)
No (Score:1, Insightful)
Shouldn't that be in 'ask slashdot'?
Coming soon: Is FTP dead?
Re:No (Score:4, Funny)
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?
Anyone have any examples? (Score:2)
Re:Anyone have any examples? (Score:2)
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.
Examples? Right here (Score:1)
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
Re:Examples? Right here (Score:2)
I have X-Com running just fine in WinXP, incidentally. In fact, a little better than it ran back when I first played it.
Re:Examples? Right here (Score:2)
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.
Re:Examples? Right here (Score:2)
Re:Examples? Right here (Score:2)
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
But what about the games? (Score:2, Informative)
Does anybody know a good virtual source for the real great classics (if not a phsyical dealer?)
DOS Box (Score:2, Interesting)
Transport Tycoon with DOSEmu (Score:3, Informative)
What old DOS games did you play that were easy? (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:What old DOS games did you play that were easy? (Score:1)
--trb
Re:What old DOS games did you play that were easy? (Score:2)
Re:What old DOS games did you play that were easy? (Score:2, Interesting)
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)
Re:Wait a second... (Score:2)
Get another box (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm reading all these posts. (Score:4, Informative)
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)
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.
its ok... (Score:1)
Re:its ok... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:its ok... (Score:2)
That was a huge kick in the ass.
Rule # 1 (Score:4, Informative)
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)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Old games don't support modern hardware (Score:2, Insightful)
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
Re:Old games don't support modern hardware (Score:1)
Win2k3 and DOS (Score:1)
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.
Bootable CDs? (Score:1)
Re:Bootable CDs? (Score:1)
"Old Computer" (Score:2)
My computer is too fast to run certain games... won't a 1GHZ be waaayyy too fast?
Abandon Loader is still current (Score:1)
The ultimate challenge... (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Re:The ultimate challenge... (Score:2)
Use a VM (Score:1)
Re:Dos gaming (Score:2)
Even more fun is to knife the dogs.