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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.
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.
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.
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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
Check NT Compatible's database for Win9x game tips. They have instructions for Grim Fandango at least.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
doesn't everybody keep those old 486's around just for that?
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.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
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.
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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.
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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