Is DOS Gaming Dead?

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?

Comments

Re:It's easy

[Anonymous Coward]

Some tools here might help fix that. Try Mo'Slo or Bremze. This would keep you from having to deal with the old hardware, nice when your 486 dies and you can't replace the dead component.

You can find it googling, but here it is anyway...

[GoRK]

A few ways I know of that work pretty well:

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

Depends on the game.

[bluephone]

Games like Doom, old Sierra adventures, Maniac Mansion and othe rSCUMM games, they can all run on todays PC, albeit with help. DOOM/Quake/Hexen have lots of open source engines based on the open code, and support many newer features making the games look even better. Sierra games, like the Space Quest games, Leisure Suit Larry, and other Sierra SCI-based games also have new engines for modern PCs, although they've been reverse engineered, since they're closed source.

I have found the FreeSCI 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 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. :)

VirtualPC

[Arkham]

VirtualPC, on either a Mac or a PC, is perfect for this. Performance is adequate for DOS games, and you can install whatever DOS/Win3.1 OS you might want/need for the game to run properly.

Multiplayer

[Gamelore]

DOSbox is wonderful for old modem games. I recently played a virtual modem game of WarCraft against myself on the same PC running WinXP.

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.

If you want actual Dos for perfect compatability..

[Neuticle]

Nothing is stopping you from dual booting say winXP and win98(with it's associated dos). Win98 sp2 cds are easy to come by dirt cheap or free. If you had an older computer you probably still have them lying around, and it's still all over the p2p networks.

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 straight to a prompt.

But what about the games?

[Nomihn0]

The current state of DOS gaming is iffy at best. With some of the sleeper hits holding abandonware status, one can get by. But the classics like Duke Nukem remain licensed (until DK: Forever comes out [read: never]). The "romz" scene is full of sketchy websites that are supported by links to innapropriate content and viruses.

Does anybody know a good virtual source for the real great classics (if not a phsyical dealer?)

Transport Tycoon with DOSEmu

[linuxkrn]

I wrote a quick how-to a while ago with Transport Tycoon. I still play DOS games every now and then. Some of the classics just haven't been replaced. And yes, I know aobut simutrans, but it's no where near as good as the original.

Re:It's easy

[The Snowman]

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 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 and my favorite, Doom newsgroups.

Re:You can find it googling, but here it is anyway

[Wildfire Darkstar]

DOSBox is great, and improving all the time, but it's a bit of a nightmare to configure. Which, I mean, shouldn't be too much of a problem: chances are, if you've enough computer experience to know how to get an old DOS game running, you're probably proficient enough to muck around for a moment in a few config files to, say, get ioctl CD-ROM extensions working to run World of Xeen (or whatever).

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.

To speed up DOSBox

[zhiwenchong]

You can tweak the speed by pressing F11, F12, Ctrl-F11, Ctrl-F12 or some suchkeys. The default DOSBox runs slowly because it is constrained to using x cycles. You CAN make it faster by giving it more cycles and by lowering the framerate.

It's mentioned somewhere in the docs that are included in the zip.

Re:If you want actual Dos for perfect compatabilit

[Wildfire Darkstar]

You can always do what I do: gut a Win98 install for the DOS system files. Use a Win98 boot disk or CD to get a command prompt, and format a partition with the neccessary system files (format x: /s). Tends to cooperate a little better with more recent systems, you don't need to track down DOS install floppies, and it doesn't come with all the system program cruft that a full DOS install would. Search Google for the most essential drivers (CTMOUSE, SHSUCDX, for light-weight mouse and CD-ROM drivers that support a wide variety of hardware), and grab HIMEM and EMM386 from the Windows CD, and, a few tweaks of CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT later, you're ready to go. It worked for me, at least.

Re:Win95 game.

[IntlHarvester]

Check NT Compatible's database for Win9x game tips. They have instructions for Grim Fandango at least.

Re:DOSEmu for Linux

[Per Wigren]

DOSEmu is a LOT faster than DOSBox, but it really sucks att emulating soundcards.. You won't get sound in many games in DOSEmu..

My biggest hope for the future is QEmu! 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. :)

I'm reading all these posts.

[Inoshiro]

Yet I see no mention of DOSEmu.

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.

Re:You can find it googling, but here it is anyway

[mokiejovis]

> DOSBox is great, and improving all the time, but it's a bit of a
> 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.

Re:It's easy

[Incoherent07]

Oh, and since the other reply doesn't cover this, my version of Sim City 2000 works just fine on my current machine... maybe you're referring to the original Sim City?

There are MANY ways to still play DOS games.

[Domini]

Many DOS games work well in NT4/200/XP (NT from now on) since NT supports setting of memeory and performance options. But if this does not work, I've used VMWare with great success, but you can use DOSbox, Bocsh, VirtualPC or any other of choice.

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.

Re:The easy way

[bishiraver]

No, a lot of old games (Ultima Underworld especially) will not run in a win95/win98 environment. Any game that has special DOS memory requirements will not run in a win95/win98 environment, and as such this solution should be shunned.

Rule # 1

[mnmn]

The first rule is to have an ISA soundblaster card. Theres no substitution for this. All soundblaster emulation drivers break under DOS games, many of which cannot be run under a DOS box in win9x or DOS emulation in win2k.

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.

Re:some don't run well even on retro hardware

[mahdi13]

I've got the karma whore link for you
Scorched 3D

Re:You can find it googling, but here it is anyway

[default luser]

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.

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...