DOS emulation?

[Bashe]

Is there a way to play old DOS games on Win2000/XP? I tried DOSbox, it runs the games like crap. Is there another way to play DOS games besides that? I really wanna play OMF again. I don't think there's any source ports for it.

[wildweasel]

You can expect Dosbox to run OMF slowly - OMF was designed for a 486/Pentium system, and to be running the equivalent of a 486/Pentium in Dosbox, you'd probably need a 4 GHz computer. And that's with a frameskip setting of 1, and sound disabled.

[Bashe]

Damn...

There might (just might) be a source port for it, but I doubt it. Still, is there any other DOS emulation programs?

[wildweasel]

There's really only a few options, only one of which is freeware. You can try Bochs (freeware), but it runs slower than Dosbox; VirtualPC, which runs faster but is commercial, and then there's VMware which is also commercial.

[leileilol]

Increase the CPU cycles in DOSbox to 8000 for decent OMF performance.

(You'll need a 1.3ghz though)

DOSBox isn't slow, it's slow at default. And it's all you're getting.

Try playing in fullscreen or switch output to overlay rather than surface.

[Bashe]

Yeah I did those.

Oh well, looks like OMF is out of my grasp.

[Sephiroth]

win2000/XP are not made on top of DOS.
best case is dual boot, emulators arnt that great right now. i havnt used one that is an absolute beast.
or use an older system as a DOS box.

[leileilol]

Not really. They probably have work-in-progress supprot for it.

You don't need a 4GHz to emulate a 486, you can make do with a 1.8GHz to get a full speed 486 80MHz emulated (estimated)

I've played Duke3d in Dosbox on my athlon 950, it was playable, with the screen size lowered a bit.

[Bashe]

Ah, it's not worth dual booting. Just forget it. Maybe I could make a OMF port...

YEAH RIGHT!

I could be done, though.

[Bucket]

In the time it took you to sit on these forums, your dual boot would be installed and working already. Or you could've gone out to a computer store and bought a refurbished 586 system.

[leileilol]

Why dualboot? PCI sound cards break almost every dos game in existance.

[Mordeth]

There are other threads about this. Check them out.

[VinceDSS]

gargoylol said:

Why dualboot? PCI sound cards break almost every dos game in existance.

False, Creative SB Live! are very good for most (99.9%) DOS games (PCI sound cards). The best for DOS games is to use Win98 (SE if possible).
The SB Live even have a DOS driver if you restart in DOS mode (which is very cool).

[leileilol]

Even on a Win98se system the Live! causes problems. Slow FM OPL2/3 emulation (that actually slows the game itself, and it doesn't sound correct or authentic either), freeze-ups on Build games with reverb (sure there may be a hex-edit for Duke and Blood, but those only cover specific older versions) and some games not detecting the sound at all and only music (most to all of Sierra's games)

[VinceDSS]

Strangely I can run the build games on my system.

I see no slowdown either... the only bad point is that the midi doesnt sound right.

[myk]

I have no DOS game sound issues whatsoever with my Creative Sound Blaster 16... the cool thing is that they are still in stock.

[leileilol]

What about those AWE32's or AWE64's? They're the same as the SB16, but with additional wavetable synthesis.

And that's not an ISA card :(

[Murdoch]

See if any of the methods on this page (and utilities linked from it) help any.

http://www.gginc.org/post5-1.html