On Wed, 11 Jul 2001, Jim Leonard wrote:
[snip]
> This statement, and Lee's questions about Adlib support, have prompted
> me to start a new thread on oldschool gaming. :-) With more
> experience than I care admit, here are some random observations on
> getting old games to run in today's world:
>
> - 99% of the problems you'll have getting old games to run is speed.
> If you have a game made before 1989, chances are very high that it
> will require a 286 or lower. If you have a game made after 1989,
> chances are high that you can get it to run on your current hardware
> if you slow it down VIA HARDWARE, like disabling the caches and
> slowing the speed of the CPU. See below:
(I'm sure Jim knows all about this, since after all he taught me some of
this stuff, but ...)
I presume you're leaving OS problems out of this. Assuming we're talking
about a DOS game, usually my DOS 6.2 boot disk makes it playable; there
are only a handful that insist on something lower (the real old stuff
being mostly self-booters). The only game in my collection that requires
<6.2 is Zone 66.
> - Slowdown programs work with about 5% of games with speed-related problems.
> If one works for you, great -- but don't get your hopes up.
They work a lot better if you need to slow the action down just a little.
Interestingly, sometimes sound problems that had speed as their root cause
would sometimes play fine and sometimes not, like so:
C:\GAMES\FOO>foo
Cannot initialize sound, aborting.
C:\GAMES\FOO>foo
(and now the game plays normally and sound works fine)
Secret of Monkey Island II behaves this way on my modern computer, as do a
couple other that I have written down that I can't recall.
I'm not sure why this is. You'd think that a computer would be more
deterministic than that, heh.
I once decided to sit down and try to get every single game in my
collection to work on my modern computer. Well, it isn't so modern any
more, but ah well, it should still be good enough to play Civ III, Heroes
IV, MOO III, Warcraft III, and Wizardry VIII. Anyway, I managed to get
nearly everything to play properly with appropriate tweaking. One game
that notably refused to behave was The Two Towers, which was glitchy in
VGA mode though okay in EGA mode. I even e-mailed its designer asking for
help, to no avail. I still keep and maintain the list.
Also, I'll probably embark on re-playing the Quest for Glory series
someday, and am wondering if there's a mysterious speed-related problem at
the end of the Fighter track. This is what I've always suspected, but
I haven't been able to find information on it.
> - There is no such thing as a single Killer Retrogaming Rig. :-)
> You can use all the tricks you want but there are some games that do
> particularlly nasty tricks or make particularlly nasty assumptions
> that require original hardware. You need at least three rigs to run
> 95% of old games:
>
> - A true 8088 running at 4.77MHz with CGA for everything made
> before 1987
> - A 16MHz 80386 with a "turbo" speed control (to toggle between
> 16MHz and 8MHz)
> - A 486/33 with a "turbo" speed control
Is the 386 really all that necessary? For everything I know of, you don't
need that; you only need the 8088 with its oddball hardware, and the 486.
If I fiddle with the BIOS on the 486, it's easy to cripple to 286-ish
speed or to 386-ish speed (and adjust a little more with software slowdown
if needed).
I suppose I would need the extra computers if my taste didn't lean heavily
to adventure/RP/puzzle/strategy games.
I plan on acquiring an XT eventually (640K, 80MB hard drive, DOS 3.3, the
works :) but thought that an EGA card would work fine; I thought EGA and
the original VGA cards were fully backward-compatible WRT CGA (most modern
cards aren't). Is this not true?
Also, where can I find one of these suckers? They seem to be starting to
get to be hard to find. 386's still seem to be readily available for $30
or so, but every time I've tried (admittedly not too hard) to locate an XT
(preferably already equipped with 640K and a hard drive, since I'm not too
keen on learning *that* much about its weird hardware) I couldn't.
-- Stephen
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