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Playing Older Games on Today's Hardware?
In a follow-up to this month old article, Toby Reyelts asks: "Just like people nostalgically play games like Galaga and Ms Pacman, I'd like to play my old DOS-based games which I own - like Warcraft and Master of Orion II. Unfortunately, every Windows computer in my household runs some variant of NT which prevents these games from playing correctly. I'd like to be able to play my games simply, rather than reformatting my hard drives to contain DOS partitions. My first go, was to setup a DOS boot disk which would create a RAM drive where I could install the games. Unfortunately, it appears that ramdrive.sys (for both MS and PC DOS) has a lame 32M limitation, which is well below the gig of ram I have and the requirements for disk space for these games. (Master of Orion II requires roughly 80M of disk space). Does anyone know of a better DOS ramdrive driver or some other easy way around this problem? Does anyone else think it's silly to have to go through so much trouble to play a game you purchased only a few years ago?" I'm certain other older games may have other technical issues with current hardware, as well. So, who has been having trouble getting older games to play on their newer systems? If you have been playing older games, what things did you have to do to coax your systems to play them (if anything).
WinXP has a "Compatibilty Mode" setting associated with every executable... using that allows you to tell the OS to act like a previous version of Windows when interacting with that program. The OS's on the list include everything between Win95 and Win2K. I haven't tried this personally, but Microsoft's article about it is at http://www.microsoft.com/WINDOWSXP/pro/using/howto /gethelp/appcompat.asp. One of the coolest features of XP is that it supposedly overcomes the backwards compatibilty problems that stopped people from upgrading to Win2K.
FreeDos, www.freedos.org, is an open source "copy" of MS-DOS which would be great for playing old games. It actually is better in some respects than MS-DOS. Besides being free, in both senses, it can installed on large drives, not sure about the current limitations, but I think it's above 8 gigs now. Also the FAT-32 flavor of kernel, still in alpha/beta stages, supports Windows LFN and large partitions. If you wish to help out this project we are always looking for programmers and supports. We really could use a good EMM386 clone, and some work on the XMS managers. If anyones interested.
run a real OS, then boot other OS's in virtual machines using VMWare (VMWARE is available for winNT as well, I just like Linux :-) )
I've done it on my Pentium II 266 to run Win95, and it seemed to run at native speeds. If you have a Big Bad 1GHz+ machine with tons of ram, VMWare will work GREAT. You can re-partition for other OS's but you don't have to, you also have the option of storing that partition as a single file in your regular partition.
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
Of course, the KVM would cost more than the box itself, so an elcheapo serial mouse and keyboard could replace it. Switching a monitor to it wouldn't be any more annoying than having to reboot, I would think.
mah na mah na.
Well I'm just gonna through this out there: Anyone here attempting to play Star Wars X-wing under windows 98? I got EMS to work right but it returns a Divide By Zero when I try to configure my joystick. Anyone else had that problem?
- Hyperbolix
I think you might also be able to emulate a dos environment inside of Mandrake's LNX4WIN.
Or you could go buy an old machine for a song. Try Goodwill. Go to a garage sale. Bring a $20.
DOS has some elementary directory restructuring commands that you might be able to use to get around this limit by setting up multiple RAM drives.
SUBST {drive letter} {path} assigns the drive letter {drive letter} to a directory. It doesn't need to be on the same
ASSIGN {target}={actual} reroutes drive requests for TARGET to ACTUAL.
JOIN (this is probably what you want) driveletter: path. This allows you to access the contents of one directory through another.
These might work.
JKoebel
Here's some useful links on good-sized DOS RAMdisks. fu_rd19iXMSDSK W0rm [boot]Disks. Have fun kiddos.
No one ever says, 'I can't read that ASCII E-mail you sent me.'
I remember back in the day, even on a 486, games that were written for slower machines would run to fast to be playable. Now that your computer will be many times faster than a 486, the game will also be many times faster and definitly not usable at all. This of course doesn't apply to every game out there, but there will be some that will cause problems.
And now that we don't have a turbo button anymore, you're out of luck!
If you've got a really fast machine, try Bochs, an open source x86 emulator. The compatibility is quite remarkable (runs Win95, WinNT, Linux, etc) but there still are a few quirks. I'm not sure about sound/joystick support...
VMWare is brilliant, I used to run it at work under Windows 2000 on a 733Mhz PIII with 512Mb RAM. I ran redhat linux 7.1 and it managed everything perfectly, no re-formatting or re-partitioning and acceptable performace.
It can run a huge list of "Guest" Operating Systems (under windows):
It shares your PC's hardware brilliantly allowing sound input and output, CD-Rom sharing, floppy access, and even it's own network interface piggy-backed onto your network card.
Yes it is fairly expensive but it will allow you great OS flexibility without and re-booting, and extra cool features such as VMWare journaling which allows you to "discard" changes made to the file system at the end of a VMWare session - Ideal for running those internet attachments without worrying about virus infection.
I run Win2K at home and I am seriously considering getting it to run some of my old games, the only thing I'm not sure on is how well it would handle any old games that used 3D graphics via DirectX or OpenGL. If anyone knows / has experience....
If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let'em go, because, man, they're gone.
I dread to think what they would be like on a 2GHz P4 or an Athlon XP!
Some games are more intelligent and some don't have such issues (i.e. by not being real-time).
so, can't really help you, but I feel your pain!!
http://bochs.sourceforge.net
To get sound in DOS games under Windows NT/2000, try using VDM Sound. It is an "open, plug-in oriented platform that emulates an MPU-401 interface (for outputting high-quality MIDI music), a SoundBlaster compatible (SB16, SBPro 2, SB2, SBPro, etc.) implementation (for digital sound effects and FM/AdLib music), as well as a standard game-port interface (for playing games with joystick support)." I've used it on my Win2K box and been able to play several old DOS games with sound.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
Simply getting an older PC seems like the most natural and easiest choice here. You could probably pick up a 166 P1 or something for a song. Install a CD-Drive, ISA sound card, throw on an old copy of Win95/DOS, and your golden.
I've had limited success running DOS under Bochs (http://bochs.sourceforge.net/). Bochs is a PC hardware emulator done completely in software, so it should work on non-x86 platforms too. Additionally, it has the added "feature" of running the game slow enough to play.
Back in time a few years, I used to install the demo version of Duke 3D in a ramdisk at school because the all new P100s didn't have an easily accessible harddisk. They were booting by a ROM on the network card, where you could press F5 or F8 to stop the loading of config.sys and autoexec.bat and then you had the control. Of course, without a hard drive, you couldn't do much...
The catch here was that you couldn't use the normal DOS ramdisk because you couldn't write to config.sys. The trick around that was to find a nice little utility called fu_rd (accessible from any Simtelnet mirror) which allowed you to setup your ramdisks on the commandline, and to resize them on the fly. Not sure how it works under Windows, though.
Anyway, back to Duke3D, they finally caught us because 1) we were shouting at each other in the lab, 2) the lights on some hub or router went mad and they looked for the cause, 3) it was against their policy. Still, after that, we played Descent on the new (1996) Macs, and a little bit of Doom, too. Never been caught on those.
On another note, anybody has some info as to the development of the next version of Duke Nukem?
For more information on running DOS games under OS/2, see http://www.os2world.com/games/.
There are two versions of OS/2 available now, IBM's (called the Convenience Pack), and eComStation. eCS is better choice for the end-user. And thanks to Project Odin and VirtualPC for OS/2, you can also run tons of Windows software (more than Wine will). Plus, lots of Linux apps have been ported to OS/2, like XFree86, Gimp, Apache, and so on. In fact, I think OS/2 now runs more apps than any other OS. Plus, it makes a great desktop OS with it's powerful and easy-to-use WorkPlace Shell user interface.
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To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
I still use a MS-DOS partition for some stuff, and I still use the SRDISK ramdrive manager. It's WAY beyond ramdrive.sys (it lets you change the size of the drive on-the-fly!). I can't check it now, but it surely is still to be found in SIMTEL's MS-DOS section, or in garbo.uwasa.fi. Look for a file called sr*.zip in the ramdrive directory (my memory is a bit hazy right now).
"Trust me - I know what I'm doing."
- Sledge Hammer
VMWARE is a great solution for a lot of things but there are some issues:
1. VMWARE runs DOS very poorly. Because DOS is a 16 bit operating system, VMWARE runs it pretty poorly, when I looked it up, this was a known issue.
2. VMWARE doesn't get anything near native speeds, at least not with a Windows host. Maybe it is faster on Linux, (since they can see the source, I bet they can optimize much more), but on a 1GHz Athlon w/ Windows 2000 I don't get anywhere NEAR native speeds.
Incidentally.. Does anyone know of a good bootable dos disk image.. preferrably a hdd image that I can inject some stuff into and burn on an 'el torito' bootable cd? (Or maybe a floppy drive one that has a cd-rom driver that can load the data off of the cd-rom part of a bootable cd...)
I'm using a 1.5ghz linux system with a dos emulator to run a commodore 64 emulator so that I can play Bard's Tale
There IS a Windows Version of MOO2, you know :)