The official version of DOSBox installs and works fine on Windows 95+.

Do not play DOS games in DOSBox that are newer than 1995 since that processor is too slow.

Thanks! For some reasons I thought that DosBox was only WinXP and beyond. I don't plan to use DOSBox for anything above 1995 since I can use regular DOS for most everything at that point, it's just the early stuff that I am having trouble with. For the most part. Thanks for the help!

You'll see alot of the unofficial ports that won't work on older Windows operating systems because they were compiled with newer versions of Visual Studio but since the beginning and up to today all versions of Windows starting at 95/NT4 are supported.

Again thanks. I was able to install my X-Com UFO Defnese cd's (I got the Apocalypse edition with the original two games included) as well as Wing Commander and got them running really well. Sadly I am still using emulation to game on my specifically retro built gaming PC, which is kinda funny.

krovlar wrote:

X-Com UFO Defense runs too fast(X-Com UFO Defense Gold windows version plays music but is just a black screen), Wing Commander is on super fast forward, the sound card isn't compatible with a lot of the older dos games as Soundblaster doesn't work, but Soundblaster pro seems to.

Didn't someone come up with a fix for those already? They are immensely popular games and someone must have tinkered with them by now.

As for the sound card, do you have the DOS drivers (i.e. sbinit.com) ?

I have one set of drivers, but I guess there is an issue with the particular card I have, CT4700, where there are two sets of drivers. One from SoundBlaster/Creative Labs, and one from Ensoniq I believe. As far as tinkering with fixes, I haven't read anything about it. There is UFOExtender, but I don't think that is exactly what you are talking about.

krovlar wrote:

I have one set of drivers, but I guess there is an issue with the particular card I have, CT4700, where there are two sets of drivers. One from SoundBlaster/Creative Labs, and one from Ensoniq I believe.

Creative bought Ensoniq and re-released one of Ensoniq's cards. I don't think the drivers are interchangable.

As far as tinkering with fixes, I haven't read anything about it. There is UFOExtender, but I don't think that is exactly what you are talking about.

If nothing else, Open XCOM finally came out recently.

Thanks for the heads up on OpenXcom. I'm going to see if it installs on my Pentium 3 machine. If it works like it says it does I'll be very excited to see Terror from the Deep come from them eventually. Hopefully.

Wing Commander is on super fast forward, the sound card isn't compatible with a lot of the older dos games as Soundblaster doesn't work, but Soundblaster pro seems to.

I know your pain. That's the great thing about DOSBox, is the control you can have over everything like sound cards, graphics and CPU speed.
My suggestion is to just use your old PC for Windows 95/98 games only, and play your dos games with DOSBox on a faster PC running anything from Windows/Mac/Linux.

Why? Well any emulator is going to require the host PC to give up a little more resources so the bytecode translation stuff works faster. That's the common drawback of emulation. You think your DOS games may run fast, but some top DOS titles will probably run a lot slower on your Win98 box if you use DOSBox on there, I guarantee it. Although.... the thing is, you could probably try using core=dynamic for everything if you ahve a Pentium 1 and play every dos game at the speed you want without running into any crashes. That might actually not be a bad idea.

He already mentioned that he wanted to use his other machine because it has a "lower resolution monitor" (whatever that means).

I suppose it is just a CRT, maybe a smaller one. Shouldn't be a problem to hook that up to a modern machine.

It's a smaller flat panel monitor with a max resolution of 1024x768. Old games look much better on it than they do on my 30 inch 1080p monitor. As to hooking it up to my newer PC, it's do-able but that means unplugging it from my retro PC, unplugging my newPC monitor, plugging in the retro one, playing the game, then swapping them all back and re-arranging the icons on my desktop after everything went to 1024x768 and then back to 1080p. It's just easier to use the older PC if its not having any problems playing the game.