tech question: playing old shit that runs on MS-DOS

[Kelgar]

I suddenly felt an urge to play the first release of Jagged Alliance (1995), so I DLed from a site that hosts old games. I installed it and set the ghetto sound options from MS-DOS prompt and then typed in the .exe command and got......nothing.

Does anyone have an idea of what I need to do before this will work? Windows XP is my OS.

[Llaffer]

If you can get a hold of an old Win98 boot disk, that's about the only way you'll get a true DOS environment. ME and up got rid of the DOS boot-disk and went to a windows-based-recovery thing that is DOS-like, but not DOS.

[Dups.]

There is an option in Windows XP that lets you select an older O/S and Windows acts like the OS you selected.

I forget exactly where it is. You can search for it on newsgroups.. the answer is probably there for what I am talking about.

If I figure out where to go for it before you do I will post it.

Also, can you boot into safe mode with command prompt. Which boots XP to windows and on the next reboot brings you into DOS. Not sure if it's true DOS though.

[kyoukan]

yeah, most dos games are a wash on win2k/xp unless you can boot to pure dos from a floppy. there's just no support for it in the shell.

[Bubba Grizz]

I feel yer pain bud. One of my favorite games is XCom and I can't get it to run on my normal box. Also those old Magic the Gathering games.

[Deward]

You can get Magic the Gathering to run on Windows 2000. There is a link around here somewhere for a hacked updated version that works. I play it all the time. I haven't tried it on XP yet but I assume it will work there as well.

As for old DOS games, sometimes you can get them to work by creating a *.pif link to the executable. This opens up a pseudo DOS shell that will then run the game for you. If your DOS game flashes a black screen at you then the likely problem is that it needs to detect a certain amount of EMS memory. You can set this minimum in a pif file's properties. I have been playing the original Master Of Orion by using a pif file on WIN XP.

To create a pif file in XP, just right-click and say create new shortcut. Type teh executable name in the box and if it recognizes it as a DOS app then it will give you memory options.

[Aslanna]

Easiest way is to pick up a cheap 486/Pentium/whatever and install DOS on it. Then you can always run those old DOS things.

[Avestan]

download and use a program called DosBox. I run Master of Magic and a bunch of other Dos games with it and it works perfectly. I am at work, so I cant gie the link, but it should be easy to find.