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Maggiedoll
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17 Sep 2009, 1:09 pm

About the time I stabbed myself (right under my fingernail!) on a 486 motherboard that Kris is keeping around that he might someday rebuild in order to play old games, it occurred to me that it would be easier, and not create so much dangerous clutter, to run such games in a simulated environment. Apparently some of those old games base their speed off of the system clock, though? So while a simulated environment could be used to run such a game, if the game was originally designed to run on a 4mhz computer, putting it on a 3ghz computer would make everything move 750 times too fast.
Are there virtual machine environments that can segment less processing power, so you could actually designate the specs the game would expect?



pakled
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17 Sep 2009, 2:48 pm

Well, from personal experience, it doesn't really work that way. I have some games from the 90s I tried to play (Duke Nukem 3d, Descent 1 and 2, Heretic....you, know, that era...;)

There's something called DosBox that does an 'ok' job letting them run, thought Descent and Rise of the Triad are 'jerky'...and unplayable.

Sometimes people will port a game into the Pentium world. Of course, Zork still runs fine...;)



CloudWalker
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17 Sep 2009, 2:51 pm

I think DOSBox can do that. If you are running Windows, there's also a program called Battle Encoder Shirase that can throttles the CPU usage of any program.



CloudWalker
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17 Sep 2009, 4:21 pm

pakled wrote:
Well, from personal experience, it doesn't really work that way. I have some games from the 90s I tried to play (Duke Nukem 3d, Descent 1 and 2, Heretic....you, know, that era...;)

There's something called DosBox that does an 'ok' job letting them run, thought Descent and Rise of the Triad are 'jerky'...and unplayable.

Sometimes people will port a game into the Pentium world. Of course, Zork still runs fine...;)


Oh, pakled I didn't see your post the first time. I've only tried Daggerfall on DOSBox and that game runs quite smoothly. Have you tried setting the CPU type to dynamic in DOSBox. Disabling any software scaler could also help if the graphics is jerky.



Fogman
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18 Sep 2009, 11:42 am

Could you perhaps look around for an old copy of DOS and run that and your games on this?


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tangerine12
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21 Sep 2009, 3:36 am

I use VirualBox, as it is free.



pakled
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21 Sep 2009, 4:04 pm

hmm...might check that out. I miss Descent...;)



anna-banana
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22 Sep 2009, 12:31 pm

tangerine12 wrote:
I use VirualBox, as it is free.


yep, me too. didn't work on Vista host though.


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CloudWalker
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24 Sep 2009, 5:41 pm

anna-banana wrote:
yep, me too. didn't work on Vista host though.


That was just a installer problem and they fixed that a long time ago.

If the op is talking about 486, I assume he meant DOS-era games. In that case I think all the big irons (VMware, VirtualBox, Parallels, Microsoft) are actually less compatible than DOSBox.

Not sure if it's indicative of the situation, but I've tested a DOS-based Ghost boot disk some time ago, all the big name emulators have problems at one point or another.