Playing Old Windows Games

[Shadow Stranger]

On Windows, games based upon Windows 3.#, and pre - Windows 95 generally, won't run properly. There is a freeware program that should solve this problem, it is called DOSBox:

http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/news.php?show_news=1

Maybe the moderators should make this sticky?

(I can't offhand recall where I heard about this.)

[Kakero]

Problem, I cannot never make dosbox to run any of those old games. I've no idea what to type in the Z:\

The documentation (readme) isn't a big help as it just assume that you know what to do.

*shrugs*

I don't know if it warrants a sticky. I always thought DosBox was well known among IWers.

What is better than Dosbox however, is still having the ol' gaming machine that ran Windows 3.1. Warcraft II + Expansions, DM II, Daggerfall, StoneKeep, Heretic, Quake, and more! Whenever I get bored I just hook her up and it runs with no problem.

[Shadow Stranger]

From the Readme:
Q: I've got a Z instead of a C at the prompt.
A: You have to make your directories available as drives in DOSBox by using
the "mount" command. For example, in Windows "mount C D:\GAMES" will give
you a C drive in DOSBox which points to your Windows D:\GAMES directory.
In Linux, "mount c /home/username" will give you a C drive in DOSBox
which points to /home/username in Linux.
To change to the drive mounted like above, type "C:". If everything went
fine, DOSBox will display the prompt "C:\>".

(My explanation)
Idea is to create a folder which is set aside for old games. Then you get the DosBox running and you mount this folder as a virtual drive. Thus in the example below you take the folder C:\Prophet and call it your virtual C drive, then you take the Y: drive and make it your virtual D drive and finally you switch to the new drive by typing C:

MOUNT C C:\PROPHET
MOUNT D Y:\ -t cdrom
C:

You can add these instructions to the end of the dosbox.conf file so they will run automatically every time the DosBox program starts.

[CerebroDragon]

You can also use a nice and easy frontend program like D-Fend to create profiles for ye ol' classic DOS games. It's not that hard at all and just takes a little experimentation. This is more for those who don't like getting into the nitty gritty of DOS commands.

You can get it from here:
http://emulationrealm.net/modules/wf...at.php?cid=219

I think it does help to have a decent rig though to run some games on high cycles. I can't get Stonekeep to operate smoothly enough as to be playable in DOS-box unfortunately.
Having a spare classic games machine as Secretmaster says, is definitely a blessing here.