Gaming Tricks to play old DOS/Win95/Win98 games in WinXP

[ar81]

Here some info I have been gathering from different places on how to emulate old computers. If you find inaccuracies or you know about ways to make old games to run, please feel free to add a reply.

Moderators, could you make this a sticky thread?

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Some old games work if you set compatibility mode to an older Windows version to the installer or game executable. But some old games do not work that way.

There are a few games in which their communities have made unofficial patches that allow running under XP. But in most of cases you do not have that.

So you are there, stuck with an original game you paid for, and no support and no way to revive the old days of gaming. Fortunately there is hope. There is freeware you may use to go back to the old days.

EMULATION VIA APLICATION COMPATIBILITY TOOL (ACT)

You could try is to use the Windows Application Compatability Toolkit (ACT) to force the computer to emulate a slow CPU. Exact instructions follow:

1.Download ACT from the link showed above and install it. To install ACT you will require .NET framework, which you may get here.

2. Open the Compatibility Administrator Tool.

3. On the left side of the window, under "Custom Databases", there should be an entry entitled "New Database" or something similar. Right-click on it, click on it and select "Create New/Application Fix" from the menu.

3a. If there is not a new database entry already present, create one by selecting "File/New" from the menu bar, then continue as above.

4. Enter the appropriate information in the dialog box. For example the program should be located at "C:\Program Files\GameDir\MyGame.exe". Click Next.

5. Where it asks you to select compatibility modes to be applied to the program, Select the one for the operating system you are going to emulate. Hit Next.

6. You should be at the compatibility fixes screen. If you need to emulate a slow CPU, scroll down until you find "EmulateSlowCPU", and click the check box next to it. If you are going to run a game in software mode, also click the check box next to "ForceDirectDrawEmulation", otherwise leave it blank. Leave everything else blank. Click Next.

Note: Setting "ForceDirectDrawEmulation" will turn off 3d acceleration automatically when launching the program, thus relieving you of the difficulty of opening dxdiag every single time you want to run your game.
7. On the matching information screen, just accept the default options. Click the Finish button. The dialog box should close.

8. Repeat steps 3 to 7 for other games you may want to add to the database.

9. Click the save button at the top of the window. Name your new database, and save it somewhere on your hard drive (it really doesn't matter where).

10. Right-click on the database you just saved, and choose "Install" from the drop-down menu.

11. You're done! Close the compatibility administrator and run your game.
Note: If you have enabled Win 95/98/ME compatibility, disable it before applying this fix.

EMULATION OF HARDWARE WITH VIRTUAL PC

Some games may be reluctant to run under ACT, specially low end games that used DirectX 5.0 or lower. For those games you may want to download Virtual PC.

Basically it emulates an old computer hardware with no joystick and a VESA videocard and Sound Blaster sound. Once you install the software, you need to configure your new virtual machine.

Once you turn on your virtual machine, you may need the proper OS installer (for example, Windows 98 installation disk).

Virtual PC comes with some software additions that can be installed in the guest operating system, but those could make your games not to work properly.

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3DFX VIDEO CARDS EMULATION

With ACT you emulated your old operating system.
But how about your video card?

3DFX cards came with software that had an API (a library of functions that activated the video cards and cause it to perform operations). There are wrappers that cheat old games so they believe they have a 3DFX card by emulating that API. Only a few games that make direct calls on the hardware, will not work, since no wrapper can detect such a hardware call.

There are some glide wrappers around.

dgVoodooGlide wrapper.

Many games appear to work perfectly (pre-rendered in-game movies included) with v1.40 of the dgVoodoo wrapper (and hopefully all subsequent releases as well).
To use this wrapper with either game, extract/copy the following files from the dgVoodoo archive into the root game directory (wherever you installed the game to; e.g. C:\games\MyGame )

glide2x.dll
glide2x.ovl
dgVoodoo.vxd
dgVoodooSetup.exe

Only these four files are needed. Next run dgVoodooSetup.exe (the new copy in the game directory!), select the "Glide" tab, and under "LFB Access" select the "Closer to real hardware" checkbox. This will prevent some confusing 'ghosting' problems that can occur in the game's full-screen mode.

You may in addition wish to enable dgVoodoo's "windowed mode" option. This enables the entire game to run in a window, which can be invaluable if you have CTD (crash to desktop) issues with the game, as your desktop resolution and colour depth will not be affected by a CTD. To enable windowed mode, go to the "Global" tab in dgVoodooSetup, and select the "Windowed mode" checkbox.

Now run the game! You can choose both the 640x480 and 800x600 Glide/3Dfx video modes, or for the best possible display quality, try setting the Resolution (under the Glide tab in dgVoodooSetup) to 1600x1200 and then using the 800x600 shortcut to run the game (if doing this in Windowed mode, you will of course also need to set a desktop resolution of at least 1600x1200!). Some aspects of the game will still render at an effective 800x600, but as the consequent scaling is by a factor of exactly two, there are no resulting artifacts. On-screen 3D objects will benefit from the higher resolution, however! Having said that, the scaling can cause the pre-rendered video performance to suffer quite noticeably, so you may still prefer to stick to 800x600.

Many games appear to run perfectly with the above settings, so I do not recommend further modifications to the default configuration. In particular, do NOT force triple buffering (under Glide - Miscellaneous) or you will likely suffer problems with the in-game movies. The information given here was based on testing performed under Win98SE with a GeForce4 Ti4200 and nVidia's 56.64 drivers.

Zeckensacks Glide Wrapper

Set pagefile/virtual memory to 512MB or less.
Apparently 1GB system RAM is max that works.
May need older Nvidia drivers.
May not be possible to get it to work with Geforce 6 series as drivers that work with 5 (FX) series are from before 6 series were supported. But I'm actually unsure about this bit.
No known problems with ATI drivers.
If performance is poor, turn off motion blur in glide wrapper settings.

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DOS EMULATION

If you are to emulate DOS, you may use DosBox.
It is highly recommended that you download a frontend so you have a visual interfase to configure DosBox profiles.

DOSBox seems to run games up to AT-80386 chipsets, but many games from the latest part of DOS era, that run under Protected Mode do not work properly. Probably in the future, makers of DosBox may support it. Until then that's the best we have.

 

[MeDiCS]

If you run Linux, there's always Wine. Actually, Wine can even be used inside Windows itself to emulate older (Windows) systems, but I don't know the details.
Also, there are other Virtual Machines available like VirtualBox.

 

[ar81]

It would be useful to have the technical details on hardware that is emulated, limitations and steps to configure to play games on Virtual Box.

 

[Andy44]

Last time I tried to run a Windows 95 application (a program for communicating with my old TI-85 calculator) on my XP machine, it worked fine at first.

Until I started getting occasional bluescreens, even when I wasn't running the app.

I blew it off until one day my machine wouldn't boot up. I had to take a bath and format the hard drive.

Never again.

Not on my main machine, anyway.

 

[ar81]

I tried VMWare Workstation and it worked worse than Virtual PC 2007.
VMware had sound issues (no sound) and I could not enable USB or Joystick port. It seems that Win98 under VMware did not recognize my Creative sound card, and it should be supposed to do so.

I stay with Virtual PC 2007.
It comes from Microsoft.

I have not tried to connect virtual machines with XP.
I would say that if you want to play, you better do not connect them.
I have been using Virtual PC 2007 for some time with no problems.
It runs Mechwarrior 2 games smoothly.

In case you plan to try Virtual PC additions, here you may find some info.

 

[ex-orbinaut]

Good thread! Got lots of old PC games that dont run on XP. I will add this small contribution for old times sake;

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/

A Sinclair Spectrum site, with emulators and games. Now you can nostalgically play the original Elite again!

This next is a bit off-topic, but does anybody know of an Amiga emulator that does not need you to buy the Kickstart ROM?

There's this Wiki link to Amiga emulator sites, but normally for Amiga you need to buy a CD with the ROM emulation, too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UAE_(emulator)

 

[ar81]

Stella is an Atari 2600 emulator.
Atari800Win Plus to emulate Atari 800

 

[n122vu]

ScummVM - emulator for playing the old LucasArts games (Indiana Jones series, etc) and similar games by other publishers based on SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion)

 

[ar81]

Wikipedia: List of freeware video games.
More about free games for XP.

 

[ar81]

Some useful tools for gamers:

Change resolution - It allows to quickly change resolution. Some resolutions are not available in the screen properties screen, so this tool may allow you to access them.

Boxer for Windows - A visual interface frontend for DOSBOX, just unzip in the DOSBOX directory.

DOSBOX script generator - Allows to quickly generate script to mount drives in DOSBOX. Best used in combination with Boxer.

Dice roller - Useful to roll dice in your computer if you lost yours. Basically you type the dice type like
2d10
4d20
d100
and then you press Enter button. You may press Enter several times under the current dice type. Use CLR button to clear dice type.

The app orgininally was designed to work with Star Frontiers board game, but it is useful for any game that requires a dice.

Known issues:
-If you use Vista it may report that a DLL is missing, so you must go to
Microsoft and get it. It is a Vista issue.
-It requires dot as decimal symbol, just like Mesh Wizard. Any app I make will have these very same issues.

 

[Keatah]

Some of my Dosbox "adventures" of testings & screenshots can be seen here at Atariage.

http://www.atariage.com/forums/topi...ompatibility/page__view__findpost__p__2249856

http://www.atariage.com/forums/topi...tion-program/page__view__findpost__p__2245719

http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/179386-jamming-with-dosbox/page__view__findpost__p__2243454


With hardware advancing, and older games becoming less and less playable DosBox (and other virtualization programs) are becoming more and more important. There will come a time when Orbiter will need to be run in an equivalent "future" environment.


(mods: if this is inappropriate just kill it)

 

[jedidia]

wow, necromancy is still up and well... :lol:

Your links don't work, btw.

 

[Keatah]

wow, necromancy is still up and well... :lol:

Your links don't work, btw.

Ahh, well you're right. It would seem you need to sign-in to atariage, because these are in a more "serious" part of the forum. They're just a bunch of screenshots anyways. Let the thread die off. Perhaps it will be revived when Orbiter needs such things like DosBox or perhaps the w.i.p. WinBox.

I also gotta ask, what is it that is "bad" about reviving an old topic? What about all the new folks that came along since the topic got pushed down years ago? Are they to be banned from discussing that topic? And *if* the thread is old and unwanted, shouldn't it be erased from the forum history and allowed to expire off the server?