Hi Kiwi, 5u3 ... I read your thread and replies with much interest regarding the Old Hardwares and DosBox.
I'm one of the old time gamers who grew up with the days of Ms-Dos 3.3 onwards.
And I've been building my own pcs for quite sometime now.
What I would like to share is about my own systems setup and how it may relate to you regarding the classic gaming experiences.
I have two pcs, a contemporary pc, which I keep upgrading whenever time and money permit, and another is a classic pc.
[A]
My new system is a Quad Core based Intel system in which I play the new games and Dosbox. It's very important to build a fast (or the fastest you can afford) to bring back Dos gaming experiences. But once you have a good enough system, most of the games will run very comfortably.
Not to mention playing back those classics which have support for GM and MT32 music. With the MT-32 emulator, Dosbox brings back the MT32 music almost like the actual one. For this you need a fast processor too.
If you want to use Dosbox, use it in your newer/faster system.
As 5u3 said, not all games will run smoothly. Especially those newer protected mode games. Most of the post-1993 era games are resource intensive, since at these times, 486DX2 systems were ruling the world and they were able to handle all the things the games wanted at that time.
Unfortunately, Dosbox can only emulate a very fast 386 well, but cannot yet play like a fast 486/early pentium based system. Yet. But things will change and improve, since once upon a time, Dosbox could only load real-mode games. And looking at how Dosbox is functioning nowadays, my homage goes to the Dosbox creator and the community.
Now my classic machine. After I came back from graduation, I was almost heart-broken when I found out that my old 286 and Pentium 133 had been sold off. After started working, I got myself the new system. But I was still missing the good old days of Dos gaming.
I searched everywhere for a classic machine, but to no avail. But then, one day I saw one system sold locally in my country in a website, which is like e-bay.
It was a Pentium III 450MHz. It came with 96MB RAM, 5GB HDD and a generic S3 PCI graphics card and an Ensoniq ISA sound card. The DFI motherboard has 4 ISA, 3PCI and 1 AGP slots.
I got it immediately. And know what? I didn't stop there...
I browsed somemore and got 2 256MB PC-133 SDRAM sticks, a 3dfx Voodoo 4 4500 AGP video card, and I fitted it with my own SB AWE64 ISA soundcard. All these I put in a newly bought casing.
And I bought a new 80GB HDD for it, and added a DVD writer.
I used the old 5GB HDD for Dos. Installed Dos 6.22 and made 3 partitions in the HDD. Also installed Win3.11 for workgroups. (Some games were made for win 3.11 those days and win3.11 won't recognize a PCI soundcard. Though you can use w95 to play w3.11 games, I use it for nostalgic sake)
Then in the other HDD, I installed Win98SE. And I switch booting when required, by going to bios and changing the boot drive.
So I get the best of both worlds.
And know what? If you're using a voodoo card, you don't need a seperate vesa driver to play hi-res DOS games, like Terminator Skynet's 640x480 version or Crusader No Remorse/Regret series or any other hi-res games for that matter. That's what I found.
I use my Classic system's Dos environment to play all the "newer" dos games, and especially those that came on CDs. As a general rule, most of the CD based DOS games were resource intensive and are protected mode games. Example : Wing Commander III, IV, etc..
So build a classic system to play resource intensive Dos games and if for nothing else, you can use it for nostalgic sake.
All my games run smoothly. And of course, although I do have MoSlo, for those games that require slowdown, I prefer to use Dosbox in my new system, since it can handle "too-fast" games better.
Err...sorry for the extremely long reply. Guess I was too excited speaking of my classic system. 😀