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

Re:Windows XP will do it

[Bert64]

The windows XP compatibility mode is aimed at compatibility with earlier versions of windows. It does not provide greater compatibility with DOS, and i assume these old games would be DOS games. In particular, NT based versions of unix will prohibit programs from gaining direct access to the hardware, something which was common and often necessary for performance reasons, with DOS games. Even installing a version of dos wouldn`t work well on most machines, ms-dos can only support upto 64mb of ram afaik, while enough to play games.. is not really enough for a huge ramdisk AND games, Plus a lot of modern hardware no longer comes with dos drivers, so you may find most games run without sound etc, plus you would be using the bios routines to access disks, which is far from optimal.. and disk caching software can cause problems with games. I would use VMware or similar, it emulates generic hardware, SVGA/VESA, soundblaster etc, which should be well supported by older games, and the underlying os will be doing the actual disk io.. so performance should be better, and with a modern computer the emulation overhead shouldn`t affect the running speed of games designed for older machines, and you can easily reduce the speed of the emulated machine just incase a game runs to fast.