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

It's easy

[Anonymous Coward]

Just install DOS and dual boot.

Re:It's easy

[thegrassyknowl]

Most modern PCs are too fast to satisfactorily run games - a lot of games run so fast that you've consumed all your lives and the game is over before you were even aware that it had begun.

Old PCs are so cheap (read: free) these days. I keep an old 486 around to run the old DOS games. It's easier than jerking around with emulators, speed throttling software, non soundblaster compatible cards, etc.

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.

Re:It's easy

[TykeClone]

How about www.gator.com - make that spyware good for something!

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.

This is Typical

[vga_init]

It's actually quite surprising how support for old DOS games has been difficult to manage. With all of the information available on the subject, one would think that it's more simplistic and straightforward. After all, the hardware that these games was designed to work with was extremely limited, and there just wasn't enough plurality to suggest that a game required a feature of functionality that was so uncommon.

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.

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

The easy way

[_Sexy_Pants_]

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

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.

What old DOS games did you play that were easy?

[superultra]

are there any other ways to get old DOS titles running easily?

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 /c, I would have shaved at least a half a year off my life.

Re:Win95 game.

[IntlHarvester]

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