First post, by Alkarion
- Rank
- Member
Since I've always wondered why Wing Commander runs either too slow or too fast in Dosbox, I tested my memory by installing it on the 286/16MHz I had back in the early `90s.
I was lucky to find one exactly like mine (manufactured by a large German computer vendor named Vobis) on Ebay. Of course I first had to fight several problems. Did you know early Bios had to be provided with hard disk parameters such as WPComp and LZone? To my astonishment, googling for the old hard drive (30MB) gave the correct answers.
The second problem was that the computer would not boot from 3.5" disks but only from 5.25" disks. So I had to plug in the disk into another computer to install MS-Dos 6.22. Since my Athlon XP board didn't like my old 30MB-HD, I finally had to put the priority on functionality instead of authenticity of the old-school-experience and replaced the 30MB drive by a 1.3GB Quantum Fireball (which makes WC2 playable on a 286 - but this is yet another story).
After finally having installed Wing Commander from my original disks (well back then I had an original backup 😁 ) I realized how utterly slow my first computer had been. The OriginFX trailer became a slideshow. In-game play was relatively smooth but much slower than I remembered. You can get a feeling for the speed by setting the Dosbox cycles to 1900. While the CPU and system bus are slowing down the game considerably, it's also the graphics card which also needs considerable time to draw an entire screen. (The VGA card is a 1990-Oak-Technologies card with 256K memory.)
Then I decided to fight for enough memory to run Wing Commander 2. Having tried that on a 486 with 16MB RAM I thought I'd just run memmaker and everything would be fine. But no, memmaker only works on 386+! In fact, you cant even have EMS on a 286 (at least that's what I believe now - is it really true?). With only one meg of RAM it's almost impossible to free more than 600KB in order to play WC 2 with full music (speech is yet another story, but I only had a cheap adlib clone anyway).
Well, I think that's enough for now. Perhaps I'll write something about Windows 3.0 5.25" disk juggling later.