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Bethesda Releases Daggerfall For Free
On Thursday, Bethesda announced that for the 15th anniversary of the Elder Scrolls series, they were releasing The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall for free. They aren't providing support for the game anymore, but they posted a detailed description of how to get the game running in DOSBox. Fans of the series can now easily relive the experience of getting completely lost in those enormous dungeons. Save often.
I didn't play it when it came out, but I tried it today... and the interface is so sluggish as to be painful. My computer isn't totally up-to-date, but I'm pretty sure it can handle 486-level material pretty easily. It's very distracting, much less responsive than Ultima Underworld on a 386 (yes, I'm speaking from experience here). Don't think I'll be doing any more of it.
Also, Slickdeals broke their servers long before the Slashdot effect took hold ^_^
There is one here:
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4996141
From what I understand, dosbox emulates the CPU as well. DOSemu should run it at your CPU's speed, but I haven't used it since Linux kernel 2.0.x days. Lately I have thought about getting some of my old DOS games going, but haven't put much effort into it. Though DOSemu seems broken on 2.6--I get "LOWRAM mmap: Invalid argument / Segmentation fault" It could be a permissions problem though...(haven't tried it as root yet) The page says it was last updated in 2007, so maybe it was updated to 2.6?
This post from the Arch Linux forums may help: kernel 2.6.30 upgrade causes dosemu to segfault. It seems dosemu doesn't work with .30 but .31 version from git does work? Looks like they have a configuration suggestion too...
Then again, you may have problems with speed. Quite a while back, I tried Syndicate Wars, and it ran at about 10x speed. Way too fast. I think DOSbox solved that by emulating the CPU, so everything the game sees works like it did on an old computer. Though since it is emulating, it takes many processing cycles to do on emulated processing cycle, which means your 2.0 GHz computer may only be able to run it at say (just a wild guess), the same speed as a 100 MHz machine. Probably not even that. So I don't see a 1996 game working too well.
I would guess the easiest way would be to use an older computer and install FreeDOS or something on it. You know, that 900 MHz one collecting dust in your closet. Then you don't have to worry about emulating crap. ;-) But then you may still run into the super speed issue. This is partly why old computers had a "turbo" switch--some programs assumed the processor was at a specific speed. Some programs assumed the MIPS / clock speed was constant. 486 was below 1 MIPS/MHz, Pentium was about 2 MIPS/MHz, todays CPUs are probably much higher before you even get to the multiple cores. I think some just detect if it is a 486 or pentium and do their calculations. They don't know anything about newer CPUs, so it doesn't work...
This page has a chart of estimated speeds for a given host machine's CPU using DOSBox.
Though DOSemu seems broken on 2.6--I get "LOWRAM mmap: Invalid argument / Segmentation fault" It could be a permissions problem though...(haven't tried it as root yet)
Recent kernels don't let you mmap the first 64k of address space by default for security reasons, and this breaks stuff like DOSemu. You probably need to "echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/mmap_min_addr" as root.
Windows users can also make a shortcut to launch the game directly:
Target: "C:\Program Files\DOSBox-0.73\dosbox.exe" c:\games\magic\magic.exe
I still have my original manuals for Master of Magic, plus the 2" thick Prima Strategy Guide, chock full of tables and calculations. If ever a game needed to be open-sourced, this is the one, because I'd hate for anyone to have to re-code all those game rules again.
Cynicism, like dogmatism, can be an excuse for intellectual laziness. - Susan Shirk
Whatever you do, forget the built-in design of Oblivion and install Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul, which makes the game feel a lot more traditional. High level bosses are no longer beatable at level 1, low level critters are no longer a threat at high levels.
Which makes a lot more sense then Bethesda's design. Unfortunately, it doesn't fix Shivering Isles. So you may wish to go do Shivering Isles content first.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?