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).

Comments

Windows XP will do it

[cd_Csc]

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.

One possible answer FreeDos

[ajax142]

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.

Linux + VMWARE

[BroadbandBradley]

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.

DOS commands

[man_ls]

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

Re:What about timer speeds?

[shaniber]

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.

Not so! The MoSlo utility will slow down games quite handily. Depending on what you read, you may or may not be able to use it under windows, and it might not be as effective on a GHz screamer as it was on a 486. But it may work, and might be useful to check out.

Sound In DOS Games

[CritterNYC]

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.

Re:What about timer speeds?

[Nullsmack]

Actually, It was my understanding that a great number of games programmed for 486's or better had timing loops so it would adjust it's speed automatically, so it wouldn't do this.

In fact, late 386 and I'm sure all 486 games were programmed in this way.. It's been used like that since then. That's the main reason why Half-life will run the same speed on a p233 as an AthlonXP 1800+ (No, I'm not talking about fps here, I'm talking about stuff that should be constant.. Like running speeds and reload speeds.)

BTW, I won't even talk about the "speed cheat" that appeared back in Jan 2001.. That played with the timings of a cpu somehow to throw the timing calibration of HL out of whack. Plus it blew up quite a few cheaters' cpus (Best part >:P)