Any info out there to get old DOS games working?

[geno]

Well, I decided to bust out the old DOS games and half of them don't work under Win98SE, or through a regular Start/Shutdown/Restart in DOS. Anyone know of any sites that can help out with this? Any info is appreciated -thanks!

 

[geno]

?

 

[Windogg]

I have a old Pentium Classic 233 (32Mb EDO, 2Mb S3 Trio, Aztech soundcard) running DOS 6.22 for all my old games. The kids these day's never had to go through the pain of getting 602K of conventional memory to get Aces Over the Pacific running.

You can buy a similar system now for about $100.

 

[Pepsi90919]

himem.sys and emm386.exe......aahhhhhh the memories of extended, conventional and expanded memory.

 

[Tominator]

The easiest way would be a 'Boot Disk.' Many older games have the utility to make one on the game CD. I remember that Blood does for instance.

 

[Windogg]

The key was getting a good mouse driver. The MS Mouse driver took 23K (Ahhh the old days when 23k memory usage was considered Bloatware) while I had a IMSI mouse drive that only took 7K. My best was a disk with 619K of conventional memory.

 

[geno]

For instance, I keep getting segment errors when I dump out to DOS, before the program even runs. And in windows, it works - but very fast. I'll try the boot disk thing...

 

[monckywrench]

I loaded a small hard drive with DOS, CD drivers,self-extracting boot disk images, and misc. utilities then imaged it to a bootable CD with Nero after connecting it as a secondary drive to my Win98 system. Your mileage may vary but it is a nice way to get a portable pure DOS "drive" to play with. In a machine with two CD drives it should see your game CD without problem. Got the idea for it from computing.net which has various related posts.

 

[Wedesdo]

play the sequal...

 

[Zoltar]

Check the compatibility for each DOS game.

Create boot disks from each version of DOS.

Good luck finding them.

 

[Zenmervolt]

<<The kids these day's never had to go through the pain of getting 602K of conventional memory to get Aces Over the Pacific running.>>

That is still the most difficult thing I ever had to do with a computer. AOTP always gave me intermittant joystick issues, but Aces Over Europe and the original Red Baron, which used the same engine, never had a problem with the joystick. Interesting tidbit, if I cold-boot Win 98, I can run any member of the Aces series in a full screen DOS window. I think that when I upgrade my family's K6-500, I'll turn all the old parts into a DOS box, then I'll finally have something to do with that old 540 MB HDD.

Zenmervolt