I have bought two dos games knowing full well that it would be a gamble as I may not get them, with minimum spec requirements of 386DX 25MHz and 2MB of ram to work at all on my 3000MHz pentium 4 pc with 1000 MB ram.
Game one : flashback. when I run it I get ‘xms error’ even though I have given it at least 4096k of xms in the memory tab in properties.
game two : little big adventure. A pretty delphine logo appears and then it exits saying ‘no cd’ even though the cd is in the drive.
Any general advice from people with experience of getting dos games to work in xp?
And it would be a bonus if you could help with the specific problems above.
(with PCs as fast as they are these days compared to the days of dos gaming you’d think there’d be an emulator available, to simulate a dos environment for the games)
Pretty easy to install and set up, although it still didn’t work with the one game I’d downloaded it to play. (The Legacy: Realms of Terror, if anyone was curious).
I’ve heard good things about DosBox, a DOS emulator. Although looking at the supported game list, if you have Flashback on CD they don’t have it working.
Have you tried setting the Compatibility Mode? I never did figure out how to go directly into it, but if you type “Compatibility Mode” into the Windows Help it will run the wizard for you.
Compatability mode only goes back as far as Windows 95, so far as I know. You can access it directly by right clicking the application you want to run in compatability mode, selecting Properties, and clicking on the “Compatability” tab.
In my experience, it’s not much help with DOS games, though.
I tried dosbox. I ended up with a blank screen in flashback, and I still get the damn ‘no cd’ message in LBA. Even after I copied the contents of the CD to the HD. (I tried to install from there, but the act of copying tricks the game into thinking it’s already installed)
This may be a dumb question, but wouldn’t a dos boot disk with cdrom support do the trick?
Hi Lobsang, I’m Janx and I am a DOS-games-ahloic. I have hundreds of DOS titles I have collected over the years and I refuse to accept the Idea that I can no longer play them. It just depends upon how much effort you want to put into it.
I hope this doesn’t sound to basic, but I have no Idea how comfortable you are with DOS.
The simplest approach, if you just want to play 1 game under DOS would be to create a DOS boot disk
Which will load DOS and the necessary drivers when you boot the machine. To do this you will need an old version of DOS or get one of your friends to e-mail you a boot disk. When you have your boot disk, configure the AUTOEXEC.BAT on the disk to load all the necessary drivers, memory allocation and path to your game. There are lots of sites on the net which can tell you how to do this, or for the parameters for a specific game check the games documentation. I wrote this below as well but this is just one down and dirty way to play this 1 game. You could conceivably make several boot disks, each configured for a particular game.
Now, (IMHO) the first rule of playing DOS games is *play them under DOS *. The cleanest way to do this is to partition a part of your disk and install DOS (or allocate an entirely different disk if you like - I like 6.22). When you boot up there is a menu asking which operating system you prefer. If you choose DOS then your machine runs like an old dos machine. In doing this all the parameters you need for your games will be called from the AUTOEXEC.BAT , here is where you put in the command lines for things like your mouse, sound card, CD player root directories and such. (configurations for each game should be in the games documentation OR the game makes these additions when you install it –but not always - excuse me, I do not know how familiar you are with DOS). Right away I would suspect that ** little big adventure ** isn’t running because the CD drivers have not been loaded in a way that the game was written to recognize.
I have found that fooling around with the PIF files, to adjust XMS memory requirements and what not doesn’t always work, So I have basically 2 machines in one.
Setting this up can be a pain in the butt, because you need to sacrifice a part of your hard drive to do it,
(or get another HD) and it may call for formatting your HD and starting over, which sucks, (depending on just how gung-ho you are).
OR, you can make yourself a DOS boot disk. As I wrote above. And upon preview, I see you know about this. That should work.
Some of the older games, have no way to recognize your sound card with the newer OS. When the game is loaded, it searches for the sound card, can’t find it and dies like a dog. There is a utility
For this which uses your processor to emulate older sound cards, it is called “VDMS” it also has a shell extension that programs the PIF file for you so when you click on an icon for a game, it calls VDMS for you, then runs the game. This does not always work due to memory block conflicts with the emulator, the result is a often “hurkey-jerky” game that just ZAPS all the fun. I have tried DOS BOX Under WIN’98, 2000prof and XP, I never got it to work right.
In the end, I just reserved 2 gigs for DOS. I dusted windows 2000 because of the poor DOS support and went back to windows 98. Games that don’t run under ’98 get thrown into the DOS area, when I boot in DOS I have an ancient menu system there for stuff I want to use. You may not want to do this, but for me games are * the entire point of owning a computer. * If your machine is to hyperactive to play DOS games, (Scorched Earth for example just runs way to fast), there is a utility called “MoSlow” which you can load prior to the game (via command line in your menu system – or by writing the command line at the C:\ > prompt if your a real geek) which will cause the game to play at its “normal” - lower tech speeds. This is good for games that were designed to be played on 286’s and older.
I know in a perfect world I could just point and click, and have my games run just fine. But I have come to the conclusion that it just ain’t gonna happen that way. I love to play Terminal Velocity for example, but it just HATES any of these work arounds, so that is under the DOS partition. DOOM ][ running with ZDOOM works just fine under windows ’98 so that’s where it lives, and so on. I have SimCity 4, but my machine does not have the Cajonies to run it, When I get a better machine, then I will just use 2 separate computers, each set up for specific gaming tasks. I know this doesn’t help much, but if you want to play the games then you may be in for some considerable fiddling around. BTW, there are LOTS of sites around the net with examples regarding the set up of your AUTOEXEC.BAT, as well as the menu set up should you decide to partition your disk. Just GOOGLE “play DOS games under [your OS], you should get back zillions of hits.
wow, that’s a lot of post there Janx. I appreciate it very much
As time goes on I become more determined to play these games, particularly flashback. (I am yet to play a game that I enjoy more than I enjoyed flashback). There may come a point where I go the partition route, particularly as my efforts to create a dos boot disk have me suspecting that my floppy drive has died (and considering how much use it gets, probably died a long time ago!).
I am however a bit reluctant considering that recently I went through hell upgrading my parts. Long story short I must have restored and/or freshly installed windows xp about 6 times and now I feel like I just built the taj-mahal using matchsticks and no glue. In other words I do NOT want to touch it.
I am quite comfortable with dos. I used to create individual boot disks for games. I may now be a bit rusty on the specifics so if I can get hold of a working floppy drive (or if it turns out that all 12 of the disks I tried actually were corrupt!) I’ll use bootdisk.com to create a generic floppy with cd rom support and enough conventional memory left over.
Intresting story - a few years ago I bought alone in the dark 3. I got it running ok, but my computer was so fast (I think it was a 500MHz processor, intel’s rival at the time, cyrix I think) that I couldn’t get the character to run. The mechanism for running was to double-tap the walk key. but because the processor was so fast the delay between taps was just too small to humanly produce. Early on in the game there are bits that NEED the character to run, so I stopped playing after that.
Anyway. I’ll try to create a boot disk on a different comp (at work). If my floppy is dead I’ll ask if I can have one of the spare ones lying around at work, or get one on ebay or something.
