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DOS Games on XP
- Thread starter Fire_ze_Missles
- Start date
Missles said:
I plucked out an old game from my massive collection: Conquest of the New World. It's a DOS game and I know XP isn't built on MSDOS like Win 9x. Descent, teach me how to play old games with good sound (I read that sound emulation is a problem!).
Ehhhh, I cringed when I read this. DOSBox sucks, IMO. You may want to try running it under a virtual machine that supports SB16 emulation, and allows you to limit the amount of CPU cycles you use. Personally I feel that 133 is the limit, 166 being the cieling. Descent I starts to run a tiny bit too fast at anything above 133MHz, and many other DOS games have this issue...Their engines don't have framecapping enabled (Hence the myriad of 3Dfx Glide/OpenGL Descent I/II ports out there for Win32).
You can do a Google on VDMSound, but personally I've never gotten it to work.
PC-DOS 7.0 is now public domain, IIRC, and you can get it from ftp://ftp.vsu.ru/
If it's not, then get FreeDOS from www.freedos.org .
Personally I'm a PC-DOS guy, it's much faster than MS-DOS and 100% compatible...Huge framerate booster.
Oh, and if software emulation fails, you have two options:
1. Buy an OEM system such as a Dell or a Compaq Prolinea/Deskpro off eBay. Personally I'd go with the latter, the Prolinea and Deskpro lines are known to have some of the lowest failure rates in the industry. I had a ProLinea from 1993 back in '99 that was never serviced once, and I got it for $30 with a sound card and all from Computer Renaissance.
2. Buy a home built system off eBay.
3. The best option. Get a Via MVP3/4 based Super Socket 7 board, buy a Pentium-133, stick some PC100 RAM in it, a hard drive, and an old school Baby AT case (You can get them from www.ramplus.com ), and have yourself a DOS rig.
The ideal configuration in terms of price and performance is (I'm going to use this personally):
P-133
32MB RAM
ATi Mach64/Rage Pro PCI video card (The Rage costs a tad more, about $4, but will give about a 10fps increase, it's a Mach64 with faster core clocks and memory, and we all know how fast the Mach64 was for it's time
.1+ GB HD
Sound Blaster 16 ISA card (PCI is acceptable, but you may hve problems. Personally I use an ISA SB16 board I got from a Tandy PC out of the trash)
FIC VA-503+ board/Via MVP3/4 based mobo (Not crap like other FIC boards, this was the best Super Socket 7 board of it's time, and it OC's like a dream)
I personally recommend the Via MVP chipsets for the Socket 7 platform because they were the fastest, and the best. They also feature an AGP slot that will actually work with 2000 Pro and up and the latest Hyperion drivers. They are also quite stable, and were Via's best AMD platform product ever until the K8T series.
Enjoy your new hardware/software solution, I hope it helps. Personally I'm getting a new case so my hardware solution will work.
Info to checkout: http://www.dosgames.com/xphints.php
all from memory, or from a dream... Not sure on how well it works with various games. It might work perfectly for your game.
all from memory, or from a dream... Not sure on how well it works with various games. It might work perfectly for your game.
It crashed when I tried to run Descent on it. It ran so slow I had to manually terminate it via the Task Manager...
That all happened when it tried to load the Interplay logo at 320x240
.
On the other hand, the setup ran amazing! However, the "Test Sound Options" sounded like a camel's fart, and the "Test Music Options" sounded like a special education chorus.
That all happened when it tried to load the Interplay logo at 320x240
.On the other hand, the setup ran amazing! However, the "Test Sound Options" sounded like a camel's fart, and the "Test Music Options" sounded like a special education chorus.
Missles said:
Looks like I will have to dualboot my linux box into win98
All I know is that my 300MHz Dell Optiplex GXa with an integreated 4MB Rage Pro AGP card ran Descent, Doom, Vinyl Goddess From Mars, and anything else I put on it WAY too fast.
Oh, and by the way, have fun installing a PCI video card to play those games
. I had to slap in an 8MB PCI Rage Pro I bought from CompUSA a year earlier to remedy that.AGP cards have caused DOS games to shake and spazz out like a redneck with Tourette's on every machine I've used, regardless if the chipset drivers are installed or not.
Try using a the free beta-version of Microsoft's Virtual Server, or VMWare. They should allow you to install other OSes like DOS, Windows98, etc. The software should run perfectly in there. Here's the trial/eval download of Virtual Server. Here's the trial/eval download for VMWare.
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