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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?
Just install DOS and dual boot.
Granted, there probably were strange things that need to be addressed, but you'd figure that it shouldn't take *that* much to work out. And, of course, there is no doubt that they will eventually.
DOSBox is a great program, and it has worked wonders for me with regards to some of the more ancient games, but you can forget about using it to play the most recent DOS games. I have only used the Windows port of it, but the VM just wasn't fast enough to handle some of the fancier games, which was too bad. Even then, some older games don't work. Support is just across the board.
I approach DOS emulation with the same attitude that I approach WINE with; if your program works, then that's awesome! It will undoubtedly work well and you'll have a blast. Of course, there is a good chance that your program won't actually work (at least, not right away). Too bad for you.
In the end, there is just no substitute for the original machines available today. Maybe tomorrow.
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.
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
And the way that I'm just about to start, is find, or build, a DOS only machine. Grab a copy of win95 or 98, find a good 200mhz, and you're off. A good video card isn't really needed, since most 3d acceleration is windows-based, but a good old soundcard won't be too hard to find. You'll soon be playing Duke Nukem all night
Look it's a joke about my sig IN MY SIG! LOL!
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. :)
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
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.
- Vincit qui patitur.
DOSEmu works with both FreeDOS and M$-DOS. I haven't seen much that it won't actually run...
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.
My money's on emulators like DOSBox; if the beloved Atari ST and Amiga can live on, then by gum, we're not going to lose Wing Commander, Ultima Underworld, or Starflight, either.
Isn't it only a matter of time before my PC can achieve the (arguably ridiculous, but surely wonderful) ability to emulate its 486-based ancestors at speed?
We're indie. We're working on our 14th game.
Speaking of playing slightly older games, I find it a pain to run even Win95 games. Two that spring to mind are Rocket Jockey, which won't even install, and Grim Fandango, which is constantly freezing while it searches the disc. Is there anyway to install these on the harddrive in XP, that anyone could help my dumbass with?
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.
"Cheeze it!" - Bender
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?)
Out of all the things I've tried (VMWare, DOSEmu, FreeDOS, etc) the only way I've been able to get dos titles working perfectly is on old hardware with straight DOS. It's sad, but nothing else works well. I'm lucky in the fact I've got an old P200 with a serial mouse and ISA SoundBlaster card just for that purpose. Biggest pain though is VMWare don't even bother.
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.
If you are going this route, you may as well actually use MS-DOS 6.22, rather than Win98. Although you will most likely have better luck getting old DOS games running under Win9x than under WinXP, depending on the game and your hardware you may still have problems. On of the major problems I remember having with DOS games under Win98 was with sound: the SoundBlaster drivers that came with my SB Live! could work either with win32 (Win9x+), or DOS, but not both at the same time. So in order to get sound working in DOS games I had really mess with the config.sys & win.ini files... and after I finally got my sound working, my mouse driver died. So if you go the dual-booting route, I would say dual-boot to the actual platform you want.
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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.
Sean Daugherty "I have walked in Eternity -- and Eternity weeps."
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.
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.
Sean Daugherty "I have walked in Eternity -- and Eternity weeps."
"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."
Games : Is nitpicking the definition of 'news' dead?
PC Games (Games) | Posted by simoniker on Monday April 19, @07:57PM from the people-never-stop-bitching-dept.
NanoGator asks: "Is it really appropriate to mod nitwits up for complaining about the questions sometimes posted to Slashdot?" Well NanoGator does have a point. For some reason, there are a lot of people here who don't quite understand the concept that Slashdot is a suitable place for discussion as well as the reporting of news. Could this be the end of Microsoft as we know it?
"Derp de derp."
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
doesn't everybody keep those old 486's around just for that?
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.
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.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
This has been on my mind the last few weeks, and this topic is as good a place to post as any. What are the ideal specs for a classic DOS gaming machine? By reading these posts I've gathered the following: either a 486 or P200, loaded with DOS 6.22 and an ISA SoundBlaster 16 card. What about RAM? Lord, how embarrassing...I started off with an old 386SX-16 and worked my way up, but it's been years since I ran any of these games. Anyone care to post their optimal DOS gaming specs? Thanks.
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I've got the karma whore link for you
Scorched 3D
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
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
Um...evidentally amateurs aren't the only ones that do this. Try playing Descent on anything pentium II or faster. My experience is that the, normally, slight up and down motion of the ship becomes an uncontrollable jitter making the game unplayable because it looks like it's on crack.
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.
There's a legend that back in the day, Microsoft representative was enthusiastically babbling how well Windows 95 will preserve DOS compatibility and you can easily run most of the DOS games right off the desktop without dual-booting. Then someone from the crowd just asked "How about Ultima VII?" Without bothering to make excuses, the rep just admitted that U7 still doesn't work that easily. =)
These days, U7 is nothing more than a nightmare with which to scare DOS emulator authors. For playing the game, there's Exult.
These days the best thing that can happen to a DOS (and any older) games is a rewrite of the underlying engine so it works on modern hardware (Frotz for Infocom games, Exult for Ultima VII, Freecraft/Stratagus for Warcraft II, some others that I haven't tried, like FreeSCI and ScummVM, and so on).
For the rest, I just have to hope it works from Win98SE DOS box (most "modern" DOS games do; it was just staggering to hear Betrayal at Krondor's MIDI music with SBLive =).
It's always good to hope that DOSEMU works, in very rare primitive cases where there's no need for staggering speed (who needs Mo'slo when you have sluggish emulation? =) or fancy features like VGA and sound card (I was almost through Ultima IV with DOSEMU until the floppy I kept my savegames on died).
I've tried Bochs and DOSBox, but they're a little bit on the slow side on my comp (P3-600)...
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...
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