Dos games not working.

[rich77]

I recently installed opengl on my pc so I could play Quake 3 Arena, and now, although it works fine, Duke nukem 3-D and Star Wars Dark Forces aren't working, which are both dos games. When I select them the screen goes blank, like their trying to load. I reckon it's to do with opengl, but I've fiddled with the settings and tried different rendering and display options. Anyone know what I should do? Thanks.

[Stealthy Ivan]

What are your PC specs? What OS are you using?

[rich77]

Windows XP Professional Media Center
Service Pack 2
47 GB Hard Drive
801 MHZ Processing Speed
248 MB RAM

[Stealthy Ivan]

Well, some more ram would not hurt, at least 512mb. What kind of graphics card are you running?

[Jodwin]

Stealthy Ivan said:

Well, some more ram would not hurt, at least 512mb. What kind of graphics card are you running?

Yes, very, very essential for Dos games.[/sarcasm]


Google for Dosbox.

[leileilol]

DOSbox is the answer

[Csonicgo]

Dosbox at 800 MHz? Say it ain't so!

[leileilol]

Csonicgo said:

Dosbox at 800 MHz? Say it ain't so!

Dosbox runs fine on 800MHz. It can even play Terminal Velocity on a 400MHz.

[caco_killer]

I noticed Dell sells pure DOS PCs. It uses FreeDOS.

[Quasar]

Last time I tried FreeDOS it couldn't tell a floppy from a hard drive and wouldn't install properly.

[Maes]

leileilol said:

Dosbox runs fine on 800MHz. It can even play Terminal Velocity on a 400MHz.

Maybe from v0.70 and onwards, the older ones are just too slow to actually enjoy a 486-class game on anything below 2 GHz.

I won't bother digressing on the subject "Windows XP and DOS games", as it has been beaten to death, however I have reliable accounts of DOS games (including DOOM) working somewhat under pure Windows XP without DOSBox, but under special circumstances such as:

• No Service Pack 2 installed (1 doesn't help either)
  
• Having a partially Soundblaster compatible soundcard (my Compaq Laptop has a partially SB compatible AC'97 integrated, which could sort of work directly with DOS games by setting SB as sound, and General Midi for music (no FM). However Service Pack 2 killed this capability off.
  
• Luck. There can just be something...special about your motherboard that's not easy to pinpoint. On my current PC, I can't even start doom.exe, even with all the sound off and the most conservative setting possible. Other people I know claim to be able to play at least without sound even under Service Pack 2.
  

[Enjay]

Can't help with DF but if you want a modern port for Duke, you can get a few. I'm using Eduke32 ATM.

[Gokuma]

256mb ram is the minimum for Win XP and it runs pretty crappy at that.

Anyway, something cool is I find DETH/HETH/ZETH works more reliably in dosbox in Win XP than it does under Win 98's ms-dos/fake dos. Too bad there's nothing to make older Windows stuff work right in Win XP, such as being able to play C&C Gold multiplayer, or regular Red Alert without the v3.03 beta patch that makes some maps/mods not work.

[Mordeth]

VDMSound might be a solution. It worked for me to get my old DOS games such as Duke Nukem, Blood, etc working. Didn't get vanilla Doom to behave, though :)

[CGC002]

Gokuma said:

256mb ram is the minimum for Win XP and it runs pretty crappy at that.

Actually, 64MB is the minimum and I run at 128MB on one PC, and it runs smoothly!

Anyway, I'm not much of a windows fan, so DOSbox is your best choice, even on PCs with processors in the mHzs.