These are the Days of Old DOS

[Occulus]

I've been doing a happy dance for the past couple of days now.

Did I manage to snag a beta slot for "Stargate Worlds"? No. Not yet, anyway.

Was I gifted with a PS3 or XBox 360? No. I wish, though.

Did I somehow obtain the Spore Creature Creator a month early? Oh, how I wish that were true.

No. I got my hands on an archive, an absolute monster of an archive, of old DOS games, some of them even written by 'Anonymous'.

More than two THOUSAND old DOS games.

Go ahead- ask me anything. :D

[PVnRT]

1. Ah, the days of boot disks and changing autoexec.bat

Those were fun times.

[Occulus]

2. Even more fun now!

Now I get to deal with DosBox or such, as I have a 64-bit OS. None of these run natively; I have to mount d: d:\ when I want to play any of them!

It's still kind of fun. I've been steeping myself in the nostalgia. Remember when your graphics choices were:

EGA
CGA
Tandy

:rofl:

[NewHampshireDem]

3. At least we never had to ask

'Yeah, but will it run on my machine, since it's already six months old?'

[Occulus]

4. Oh, it's worse than that these days

Crysis can't run at 60FPS with all the DX10 goodies turned up on (it seems) amything less than at least a dual core, SLI system.

I mean, yeah, it looks great, but... do I really need a PC from five years in the future just to play it the way it was intended?

On the other hand, my "new" characters for Ultima 3 in DOS run across half the continent when I jab the movement keys. Sometimes, a game can be too "playable"...

[Systematic Chaos]

5. Does MoSlo work with DosBox?

I have seen that before... it's supposed to slow down the processor to be at a more compatible speed with those old games.

I haven't actually used DosBox since I couldn't get it to work with Might & Magic, but I think I remember references to MoSlo being usable with it.

[Forkboy]

6. haven't used MoSlo with it, but you can adjust CPU cycles in it to slow down games.

I have seen a couple things about MoSlo being used with it, but it sounded too confusing to me at the time so I didn't try it. Dosbox has worked for about 85% of the games I've tried with it though.

[Forkboy]

7. Gamer's Heaven!

I've been playing a lot of older games the last couple of years. Stumbled across a program called the Doomsday Engine that lets you play Doom 1 and 2, Hexen, and Heretic with a big graphics boost (and mouse look!). Been having a ball playing through all those old Doom wads I still have.

Just downloaded some Atari ST games to try last week too. Who needs the new stuff? :)

[Hong Kong Cavalier]

10. I've been playing Doom Legacy. Does much of the same thing.

But after a quick Google search, it looks like the Doomsday Engine has a better refined graphics look. I'll have to give it a shot, seeing as how I still have my copy of Doom II lying about. (So I can legitimately use the Doom2.wad file without feeling too guilty)

Nice!

[NewHampshireDem]

8. Post some favorites/recommendations

I'm sure I won't be able to play any right now--totally sucked in by WoW and feeling guilty about neglecting my Wii--but I'll live vicariously through you. :)

[enki23]

9. not quite DOS, but i've been going crazy with the old microprose MTG game

and loving it. ah, the good old days... but all i have left in RL are boxes of crappy leftover commons and nobody to play with anyway.

[Systematic Chaos]

11. If you are into torrent downloads, you will be in HOG HEAVEN!!

Go to isohunt.com and search for "Memories Project". There are four main downloads, plus a small supplemental, which cover a couple thousand DOS games there!

Once I had all that, I downloaded DOSBox and the DOSShell front end. I'm still learning how to get some of the games to work, but so far I've been playing a bunch of classic old pinball games and FINALLY messing around with Might and Magic: Clouds of Xeen. Back in the 90s I wanted a computer so bad just for the Might and Magic games it drove me nuts! Fortunately, a couple of them were ported over to the consoles, but I'll never forget how the SNES version of M&M 3 had a major bug where all buffs for the main Cleric stat also went to Intelligence, which was for Mages! So, you effectively had next to no healing power in the game. :(

Anyway, if you have the bandwidth and about 5 gig of extra hard drive space, you can get this stuff and knock yourself out! :D