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

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.