Comments on: Tips for Playing Classic Games on Modern PCs

By: Ziki

Ziki — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 22:41:04 +0000

Dosbox is great. I would have loved it even more if it had save states. I usually don’t condone cheating, but some DOS era games were excruciatingly difficult or didn’t have a saving system to begin with.

By: arun gupta

arun gupta — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 12:30:04 +0000

Old classic games are best ever. It is lite and east to play also.
Thanks Michael

By: Mark Spears

Mark Spears — Mon, 28 May 2012 14:58:28 +0000

Okay, I’ll keep this short. Jane’s IAF still won’t work even with a Glide wrapper… because it only switches to Glide while you’re in a mission. The menus still don’t work properly. Guess it’s time to take one of my ten-year-old machines and turn it into a Windows 98 machine for playing older stuff. I even have an old 3dfx card somewhere in the shop, that still works after all this time.

By: Mark Spears

Mark Spears — Thu, 24 May 2012 23:08:34 +0000

@Kahless, thanks for reminding me about Zeckensack’s and nGlide. Two of my favorite flight sims, Jane’s USAF and Jane’s IAF, don’t work properly under Windows 7… in fact, they don’t work properly under Windows XP. The game works, if you can navigate the menus blindly. Apparently they used some programming tricks (undocumented system calls, maybe?) that cause the menus and the arming screen to not work the way it should, even in Compatibility mode, and I’ve had no success in getting them to run on a virtual machine.

As for Jane’s USAF, some fan (or an ex-employee of Jane’s Combat Sims? I don’t know) has patched it to work with Windows XP/Vista/7 (and even added more content), but there’s still no fix for IAF. Until now. IAF does support Glide, so I’m going to test it with a Glide wrapper and see if I can make it work the way it’s supposed to. I’ll post here if it does.

By: Solo4114

Solo4114 — Mon, 21 May 2012 22:06:17 +0000

Oh sweet! So now I can fire up Crimson Skies AND use a glide wrapper for the old X-wing games!!

By: Ian Davis

Ian Davis — Mon, 21 May 2012 13:32:48 +0000

Oh, and here’s a fix for Crimson Skies. It doesn’t play well with modern GPUs. There was a point were I almost considered building a 2000-era machine just to play this. Thanks to this man’s work, we can all be happy again: (It’s the CSFIX at the very bottom) http://timeslip.chorrol.com/

By: chip

chip — Sat, 19 May 2012 13:09:17 +0000

For Starfleet Command and Silent Storm, I went the lazy route and just did a search for someones fix for the game.

By: Kahless

Kahless — Fri, 18 May 2012 07:19:36 +0000

Glide wrappers are handy things too for a lot of old games both of the DOS flavour (Tomb Raider for example) and the Win 9X variety as well as being handy for some console emulators (their Glide plugins are often the most error free, especially for the varied N64 emulators out there).

The best of the bunch are Zeckensack’s and NGlide (openGL and D3D respectively) with NGlide having the slight edge of being more frequently updated to support a wider range of games and having instructions for how to use it with Dosbox as well as a helpful list of games and “problem fixes” for them on their website.

It’s worth remembering that while Nvidia and AMD are the daddies of video cards now it was 3DFX who ruled the roost when many of the old classics were released.

By: Solo4114

Solo4114 — Thu, 17 May 2012 13:20:38 +0000

Yeah, there are a lot of free remakes out there too. Wing Commander Privateer Gold, for example, basically recreates the whole game. There’s another one too, on a different engine, which tries to be more expansive but isn’t quite as good even if it looks prettier.

By: Ian Davis

Ian Davis — Thu, 17 May 2012 01:28:32 +0000

Oh, and depending on the game you’re playing, you might want to look into a modern source port. Anything ID or on the Build engine have nice community engines which work better and often have new features.

Or, if you’re trying to play Descent, drop everything now and lookup Descent Rebirth, pretty much the only way to play this gem today.

By: Solo4114

Solo4114 — Wed, 16 May 2012 14:24:00 +0000

There are also commercial sites where you can buy classic games legitimately, for not much money at all. Good Old Games, for example (www.gog.com). These usually have a pre-configured DOSBox front-end, too.

By: vmxa

vmxa — Wed, 16 May 2012 14:00:19 +0000

There several apps that allow you to setup your DosBox games with the commands so that you just double click the entry. It then launches DosBox and passes the command line strings to it. The links for those apps are on the DosBox site.

I have used several in the past and currently use ProGammaX to launch Moo1, Moo2, Alien Legacy and Ascendancy.