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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?
I remember trying to get Porsche Unleashed working on win2k after I upgraded from win98. I eventually did get it to work, but only after a few patches and even still it wouldn't run nearly as well as it did on the older OS (and hardware too, I might add). I've also got a few DOS emulators that refuse to work under XP, but they'll run fine on other windows systems.
It's a kick in the ass for sure, and I (we) seem to be in the minority, but I think there's a fine kind of satisfaction with the intricately simple games of old that's being lost in the modern age.
Jerking around with the emulators is easier for some people, because unlike old PCs, they don't take up any space! Its great if you have room for an old 486 you keep around, but I'm guessing that a lot of people like me don't. 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).
Here's a hint. Whenever a NEWS article ends with a question mark, the answer is no. News is about reporting things that happen, not asking if something's happened or not.
Shouldn't that be in 'ask slashdot'?
Coming soon: Is FTP dead?
are there any other ways to get old DOS titles running easily?
/c, I would have shaved at least a half a year off my life.
Were they ever easy to run? I remember having multiple floppies for multiple autoexec.bat and config.sys configurations. Wing Commander; good god, was that a pain to deal with. I remember spending at least a good hour trying to get the right about of base memory to run X-Wing.
I think people forget just how much windows 95 changed gaming. The better the games, it seemed, the harder it was to get those suckers to run. The problem wasn't even having enough hardware to run it (although that was part of it). Most of the problem came from needing base memory to load mouse and sound drivers, but then the game always requiring some minimum amount of memory to run. I can't tell you how many times I saw something along the lines of:
"This program needs 514K free to run. You have 512K free."
If I had a special button on my keyboard that automatically entered memcheck
Sure, I'll do that. Just send me a driver for my USB mouse, and I'll be happy... oh, and my USB keyboard... and my on-board soundcard (which may, or may not, perfectly emulate an old Sound Blaster...)
No, really. Dig out that old 486 box with DOS 6.22, or OpenDOS 7 (remember, DR DOS people have nothing to do with the litigious bastards), or whatever version of DOS you have around, and let it run. Hell, it might even work in OS/2 or something.
This sig no verb.
Firstly... you've never tried porting old dos games (or even strangely written linux games) to more modern operating systems, have you? If you're lucky, it won't require much more effort than rewriting minor graphics, sound and input routines, but if not, it can get very troublesome. Now, regarding GTA: Rockstar re-released it for free. It's about a 100mb download. It works okay under win XP and win2k, but works much better under linux/winex :p
Anyway, if you can, try this stuff under WineX. It seems to handle those old games fairly well.
-ReK
md5sum -c reality.md5
reality: FAILED
md5sum: WARNING: 1 of 1 computed checksum did NOT match
My biggest problem with DOS games (even when actually running in DOS) is that many old games don't work with my current hardware.
_ titles.html]Scitech's Display Doctor's univbe[/url] VESA TSR don't work because the modern graphic chips (like my ATI Radeon which supports Vesa 3.0) aren't supported. I found a hacked univbe.sys a few years ago that let's me run old games, but its not perfect (I can't locate it currently). Most modern graphic cards don't have their own Vesa drivers either.
The main problem I've found is that I have a USB mouse. Well there are no USB DOS drivers so I can't use a mouse
A second problem I've had is that old games that use [url=http://www.scitechsoft.com/products/ent/free
ZDoom is my personal favorite as well, because it is one of the few ports still under active development and is probably the most stable and fastest of them all.
Note that ZDoom also fully supports Heretic and Hexen and a hefty portion of Strife at this point, so maybe in the future we'll be able to play Strife on recent OSes as well.
But how do you connect it to the Internet to download patches for the game? ;-)
Ah, the days when companies actually took the time to make the game halfway usable before shipping it in a box. Now they ship it broke and make you patch it before playing it. I blame Doom for starting that trend with the different versions of the shareware game.
Yeah it's that 386 protected mode that is really the problem with dosbox or dosemu... They are coming along though. The NTVDM should be able to deal with dos4gw when running in fullscreen, so perhpas VDMSound would be all you need. Short of that, it'd be VMware or VirtualPC (as another reply suggested has better video support than VMWare for DOS) which should definately run it.