"Installing" for DOS games just means extracting / copying the files. DOS games leave no settings in the system registry or anything. You can just copy over any existing installation and see if the game itself works.

Most of the DOS games would run awesome on your system inside the DOSBOX emulator, which you can run from inside Windows 98.

If I was going to use dosbox I think I would rather just use my modern machine, unless there's some advantage to using it on Windows 98? The main reason I don't like using dosbox is that it does not vsync properly unless you have a gsync monitor, or use dosbox with a vsync patch, which only svn daum has, and that has lots of issues.

I've tried copying over installed games using dosbox on my main machine to install them to a virtual c drive, but it doesn't seem to help with compatibility on the 775 motherboard.

You realize that Pentium E5800 IS a modern machine for a DOS game? We are talking about a 3.2GHz CPU to run games made to run at 100MHz or so, so it's about 30x as fast as an average DOS PC. You will have heaps of trouble with speed sensitivity and sound, just use DOSBOX for that machine.

Right but like I said, I can't get good vsync using dosbox so I'd rather not use it on any machine, even if it is modern. On Windows 98 I can actually get good vsync without tearing/stuttering that happens on dosbox without the vsync patch.

Just using doom or duke3d as an example (I would probably play those specific games on a modern machine but it's an example), I can get 100% smooth scrolling at 70hz under Windows 98 which is not possible on dosbox without a gsync monitor or vsync patch. Even after creating a custom 70hz resolution and forcing vsync through the driver, it still is not as smooth as a Windows 98 machine.

I haven't had speed issues with the dos games I would like to play since they are relatively late dos games. And even if I do there are tools like this: CPU Tuning, Throttling

edit:
Here's the error I get trying to run nfs se:

Well, I understand you. VSync and tearing is one way where real hardware may excel over emulation; that is, if you can get it to run at all... 😉

Do you get the same error in pure DOS mode of Win98?

I don't quite understand why you are getting vsync issues, why don't you try using opengl as the rasterizer and then force vsync on for opengl apps from the graphics card control panel?

dr_st wrote:

Well, I understand you. VSync and tearing is one way where real hardware may excel over emulation; that is, if you can get it to run at all... 😉

Do you get the same error in pure DOS mode of Win98?

I don't get an error in pure dos. It just goes back to the dos prompt after launching nfs.exe.

appiah4 wrote:

I don't quite understand why you are getting vsync issues, why don't you try using opengl as the rasterizer and then force vsync on for opengl apps from the graphics card control panel?

I've tried that but there is still periodic stuttering that does not happen either with real hardware or with the vsync patch in svn daum. If I could get a build of dosbox ece that had the vsync patch then perhaps I could use that because daum is buggy as hell.

edit: I got it working after installing the vxd drivers for the ymf 744. To my surprise, cd audio seems to work perfectly fine in daemon tools despite everything I've read saying you need to use a wdm driver. If I had known this earlier then I would have tried using a vxd driver first thing. Unfortunately it seems to take a very long time to boot into windows for some reason. It hangs for awhile after the windows logo at a black prompt and then finally gets to the desktop.