The XMEN Clan Forums

Isn't there a way to boot in DOS to play old DOS games?

Saw someone ask this in anouther forum...

I don't renember how in XP.. Would love to play Carmageddon in DOS again...

<---- to young to even remember dos !

I would like to play X-Wing again or even Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe (if I can find another copy ) or any other old Lucas Arts game for that matter.

/me looks at his pile of Win 3.1 disks and wonders if he could get that to work.

You could get Win 3.2 to work, you'd just have a hell of a time with driver support.

Short answer is "yes." But as Hat mentioned, modern hardware is often not supported by old DOS stuff. There are several ways to play your old DOS games, though.

DOSbox. Follow the instructions carefully.
http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/news.php?show_news=1

There are a few other similar projects out there, but you'll likely have the best luck overall with this one.

K thanks...

Install it under windows. Create a desktop shortcut, right click on the shortcut and see the tab that say's compatibility? Use the Windows 95 one, I have gotten almost all DOS games to run under that or under the Windows 98 compatibility mode.

Just my 2 cents.

Wow, these forums have moved and changed since the last time I was here.

I will give your, Iceman, suggestion a try the next time I get the chance. If that doesn't work I will try the DOS emulator. The last ditch thing I can do is reinstall my second computer with Win98.

Some old Dos games I have gotten to play under Windows 98, but inorder to play correctly you need to turn graphic acceleration down completely I know this was the case in order to play Ultima Underworld. I was also able to get Aces of the deep to load, but because I had no dos drivers for my mouse I could not get it to play, Also I had to play with no sound because it would crash everytime a sound was made. I eventually gave up trying to get it to work.

If you can get the old DOS drivers for your sound card then you can put it into the Autoexec.DOS file like the old days and it will load them when it runs a DOS program.

I knew that....



























Not really

Most of the DOS drivers for sound cards exist only for ISA cards - which aren't in use much anymore. One solution is VDMSound ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/vdmsound/ ) that exists to make modern sound hardware accessible to old DOS programs.

Works pretty well, but I've had better luck overall with DOSbox.

I have installed Earthseige 2 and can play it in the tutorial mode but not in story mode. When I start a mission in the campain it acts like the system is busy, lagging, moving a frame every few seconds but my system has hardly any use. Ice, have you had this problem with any DOS games?

When using a DOS emulator of any sort, you'll have to fiddle with some of the settings to get most games working acceptably. Most notable are the emulated CPU cycles and frame-skipping, but other things like audio or rendering method can make a big difference too. It's not so much that it's consuming all the resources on your real box, but there's a bottleneck somewhere and you just have to find it. You may find some help on the net if you google for dosbox + earthsiege.