Only on very, very old games. I mean games that were old when the games Stonebow is raving about were new. The 80286 in the IBM PC/AT introduced the CPU timer problem into gaming. That was in 1983. Poorly written games that required the use of the “TurboSwitch” had pretty much disappeared by 1990 or so.
The problem for late 80’s/early 90’s games is mainly sound hardware. Old DOS games banged on the sound/joystick hardware directly and the WinNT HAL doesn’t allow this, hence the need for a work-around.
Stonebow: I got my PC up and running again and NEED to play TIE Fighter. I got DOSBox, but I get lag, frame skips, and so forth. If you could email me letting me know what you did exactly that would be great!
If that’s true why do so many early 90’s games run so ridiculously fast on my current computer, if they work at all? Try driving around in Police Quest 3 and tell me the clock speed hasn’t sped up the game!
Heh, if you can get one of the DOS versions of Wing Commander 2 to run on a newer PC (like, say, Windows 95 or Windows 98 era PCs) you get an interesting bug. The game is set up so it still runs fine, but some of the cutscene animations run a bit too fast. For example, one oft-used animation during in-flight cutscenes is a view of you from outside your fighter, to one side, as you slowly move from right to left while your character and whoever you’re talking to trade dialogue. On a faster PC, this animation runs a bit faster than it was apparantly intended to, because after about half of your fighter goes past, you realize you only have the front half of the fighter in the cutscene before the lack-of-a-back-half of your fighter begins to go past too.
I gotta disagree. Don’t get me wrong, it had its share of problems. The interface wasn’t well designed, the space combat engine was horrible, and CTD errors were prevalent. But if you can struggle past those things it really was a fun strategy game. I lost whole weekends to it. Just auto-resolve the battles and save often. I’d like to see a sequel that fixes those problems.
OK, if anyone else has it running good, a little help?
I have DosBox and D-Fend, but the sound skips like mad. If I turn off sound, the game runs ok, but anytime I have sound on, the sound and game itself skips a lot, to the point of unplayability. And play without sound? Blasphemy!
I also tried running it with VDMSound, but when I do that, the exe file won’t run. It gives me an error about the cd needing to be in the cd drive, even though it is…but, since it runs in DOS, there is no CD drive support unless I use DosBox, which makes it skip.