I want to play some of my older DOS games, but my computer’s just too damn fast for them to be playable. Unfortunately, my BIOS only supports overclocking, not underclocking, so I need a software solution. Does such an animal exist? I can’t remember the specific mobo at the moment, but it’s based on the KT800 chipset. The CPU is an Athlon 64 3000+.
You are probably going to run into a lot more problems than just the clock speed.
Here’s a page that may help:
http://www.dosgames.com/xphints.php
It addresses the speed issue as well as many more problems you are likely to encounter.
You could also try a DOS emulator like Dosbox. That should address the speed issue and perhaps also other issues that haven’t popped up yet. It’s especially helpful for certain games that won’t run at all on Windows 2000/XP.
I made a bit of a mistake. I tried to run the game in Dosbox only to discover that it is in fact an old Windows game (circa '94). It’s definitely Win9x compatible (that’s how I used to play it), but it just runs too fast on this system to be playable. That, and the sound’s wonky, but I can deal with that later. So it seems I don’t really need an emulator, just some way to throttle back the processor a bit, down to 10% or so of its usual performance. Disabling the L1 and/or L2 cache should do that, but then Windows will take forever to load, and I don’t know how well it’ll actually run the game with such a handicap. Any thoughts?
Go to this page and download Turbo.
Have you tried it with WinXP? The site only mentions compatibility with 9x and NT.
Yes, it works simply by taking up a percentage of your CPU’s power. I tried it on XP and everything became slower. I don’t know how well it would work with your particular game, but it’s worth a try…
I mean, in theory, it should work perfectly with any game. But of course, in practice, theory doesn’t always work.
Thanks! I’ll give it a shot tonight.