How do I make those old fun DOS games work on Windows XP?

December 19, 2003 11:34 PM

How do I make those old fun DOS games work on Windows XP? Ever played Starcontrol II? Quake I? Has my dumb OS robbed me forever of those early joys, or is there hope? [more inside]

Yes, I know windows has a silly DOS emulator that pretends to work. But I can't understand how this is done. Is my window size wrong? Do I need some fancy parameters? I would all write this off to me being a dummy, but I remember it all seemed just peachy back when I was running win 98.

posted by Happydaz to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Dosbox.
posted by LukeyBoy at 11:39 PM on December 19, 2003

There are a number of 3rd party utilities that can help you (I use VMware running Windows 98 (since the VMware tools give you graphics accelerating in 98), but there is the relatively unknown (and free) Application Compatibility Toolkit from Microsoft that I've used to great success in the past.
posted by j.edwards at 1:10 AM on December 20, 2003

Dosbox is great, I use it all the time to play Epic Pinball. For easy starting of old games, add a shortcut to dosbox.exe to your Send To menu. And press Ctrl+F12 a couple of times if games are running to slowly or if sound is distorted.
posted by milov at 3:05 AM on December 20, 2003

dosbox isn't blazing fast on newer games like Quake, so you might also want to try using something like VDMSound to help get games working under the built-in stuff. It really helps in those situations where a game runs but sound doesn't work -- one of the most common problems.

Overall VMWare is your best bet. It takes quite a bit of finagling, but I was able to get a pretty good replica of a "nice old DOS machine" running under it, and just about everything works.
posted by majick at 5:58 AM on December 20, 2003

You can get a bunch of files for running Quake under Windows here.
posted by Orange Goblin at 6:25 AM on December 20, 2003

For quake, I'd just grab the win32 version of quakeforge. I use the linux version on my laptop and it works great.
posted by duckstab at 7:44 AM on December 20, 2003

If you're specifically interested in older LucasArts adventure titles, ScummVM does a very nice job of running most SCUMM engine games.
posted by Monster_Zero at 10:59 AM on December 20, 2003

Response by poster: Thanks! I'll try Dosbox, and perhaps quakeforge. Now if I can just find some people still playing quake TF...
posted by Happydaz at 12:52 PM on December 20, 2003