I don't know of any other version of Prehistoric 2 for DOS. But I do remember playing gameboy games via emulation on a 486 DX 40. Not in 1996, but around 2000 or so, which is not too far off. Perhaps you were playing an emulated version on your P75?

K1n9_Duk3 wrote:

I don't know of any other version of Prehistoric 2 for DOS. But I do remember playing gameboy games via emulation on a 486 DX 40. Not in 1996, but around 2000 or so, which is not too far off. Perhaps you were playing an emulated version on your P75?

I already thought about that, but I clearly remember playing it on a pentium 75, which "died" around 1998, so it was not an snes emulator... or was it?.

I also remember using norton commander to launch it, and the game running at 30 fps 😀.

This is wierd, nobody seems to remember it.

It may also be a windows 95 version, or another very similar game, or some pirate game using the same assets? 🤣. I don´t know. 😊 😕.

I also know and played back then the "simpler" version, I wish the DOS one was like the snes version.... Most likely you remember emulation or maybe some pirate emulator wrapper of the era?

most likely a dos snes emulator, prehistoric 2 only came in 1 version on pc then later the improved version came on consoles, if it showed the fps then more likely its a emulator the dos games usually didn't show fps

keropi wrote:

Most likely you remember emulation or maybe some pirate emulator wrapper of the era?

That might explain that.
Is it possible that in 1996, there was some kind of pirate wrapper capable of running the snes version on a pentium 75? That pc is surely able to do it.

EDIT: This is cool... according to Emulation General Wiki:

Snes9x was a merged effort of Snes96 and Snes97, both released sometime in 1996-1997.
ZSNES was first released on October 14, 1997.

And I can read at ZSNES Board the requirements for ZSNES in MSDOS:

DOS Port: Somewhat Recommended System: - 486/100 processor - Min 14.5MB of RAM (or min 12.5MB free, which can only r […]
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DOS Port:
Somewhat Recommended System:
- 486/100 processor
- Min 14.5MB of RAM (or min 12.5MB free, which can only run 2MB rom images)
- VGA card
- Sound Blaster or 100% compatible
**You might need to disable SPC emulation for this system (go to
Config-->Sound)**

treeman wrote:

most likely a dos snes emulator, prehistoric 2 only came in 1 version on pc then later the improved version came on consoles, if it showed the fps then more likely its a emulator the dos games usually didn't show fps

The game didn't show any fps counter, I just meant it was not smooth, and reading the zsnes requirements, (if what I played was some sort of pirate wrapper of zsnes), it is possible my p75 run the game not very smooth.

I just have to test zsnes with some kind of accurate emulator like pcem 😀.

i see, I remember back in those days genesis emulator (mega drive) would run well on fast 486/ p60-75 but snes would be laggy like you described, I would say 99% chance it was emulated.

I have and still am very big fan of both prehistoric games and researched all the platforms to try play all the different versions. Have never found any different version to the pc one that would sometimes crash on level 2 or 3.

There is also the original game - Prehistorik, which had an MS-DOS version. It's also not like the SNES version, but it did have caves:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistorik

Thanks, at least I discovered emulation of snes and megadrive/genesis is older than I remember 😀.