Dosbox on dual 1.4ghz PIII Win2k machine to cover DOS games? \ VOGONS

Dosbox on dual 1.4ghz PIII Win2k machine to cover DOS games?

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First post, by kalm_traveler

Posted on 2019-07-08, 05:19

kalm_traveler Offline

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Just wondering if this might be a good idea for my main retro rig. Most of the older games I want to play on it either are already native Windows or are newer DOS titles and seem to still work correctly under Windows 2000 but there are a handful that seem to need actual DOS (or at least DOS overlayed by say Windows 9x) to run correctly.

Rather than hassle with dual-booting 9x and 2k on this thing, might it make more sense to just play those few games on it via dosbox? Or would it be too slow to emulate a 386/486?

Retro: Win2k/98SE - P3 1.13ghz, 512mb PC133 SDRAM, Quadro4 980XGL, Aureal Vortex 2
modern:i9 10980XE, 64gb DDR4, 2x Titan RTX | i9 9900KS, 32gb DDR4, RTX 2080 Ti | '19 Razer Blade Pro

Reply 1 of 3, by luckybob

Posted on 2019-07-08, 06:54

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It will work okay.

A dual p3 1.4 is best suited for early XP games.

but building a "retro" pc to play slower games is a bit of a head scratcher for me. Might as well do it on a new machine and save the time/effort.

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

Reply 2 of 3, by DosFreak

Posted on 2019-07-08, 11:16

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DOSBox works on Windows 2000 but it'll only use one core so don't expect many protected mode games to run well on a P3. Install VDMSound and NOLFB for those or dual-boot with DOS.

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Reply 3 of 3, by kalm_traveler

Posted on 2019-07-08, 15:26

kalm_traveler Offline

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luckybob wrote:
It will work okay.

A dual p3 1.4 is best suited for early XP games.

but building a "retro" pc to play slower games is a bit of a head scratcher for me. Might as well do it on a new machine and save the time/effort.

I had a 'best of 2000' rig but the motherboard had some issues so I decided to upgrade it. There are a few old games that I play which run too fast on modern machines so i figured it would be fun to build a retro rig and run everything on original hardware, plus that you can drop the cpu multiplier to get speed-sensitive games to run properly.

Anywho thanks both of you! I'll give it a whirl, and if worse comes to worse will set up dual boot

Retro: Win2k/98SE - P3 1.13ghz, 512mb PC133 SDRAM, Quadro4 980XGL, Aureal Vortex 2
modern:i9 10980XE, 64gb DDR4, 2x Titan RTX | i9 9900KS, 32gb DDR4, RTX 2080 Ti | '19 Razer Blade Pro

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