First post, by Kerr Avon
Why do so many people here like using old PCs to play their games? I'm not criticising of course (even if I thought it was a bad idea, which I don't, it's up to you what you do) as if you enjoy playing games on old PCs then great, but I don't see why someone would, for example, want to go to the trouble of building an 486 or Pentium 1 PC, with a 14" monitor, 10GB (and very slow, relatively speaking) hard drive, and a 3dfx Voodoo 1, when you can just use DOSBox/VDMSound/a Virtual PC/etc to run the games on the system you already have, and not have to find room for the second, legacy PC.
Is it because some games can't be made to run at all on modern systems, no matter what you do*? Or that you prefer to play the games on the system that they were intended for? Or is it the whole building a PC and refining it to how you want it to be (which is a fascinating hobby, I know).
Like I say, please don't think I'm trolling, I'm just curious as to why people would spend time and effort for something that can largely or totally be achieved on your own, pre-existing PC. Especially since you can alter DOSBox's settings much easier than having to mess around with boot discs or multiple config.sys lines for problematic games.
Having said that, I've been meaning for years to build an arcade cabinet, for MAME (and also to use as a jukebox), so maybe I'm showing signs of catching the bug? The problem for me, (other than procrastination 😒 ) is space, since I really want to make a sit-down cabinet. Ideally the cabinet would be on hydraulics, but that's way beyond my expertise and budget. 🙁
* If there are games that can't be made to run on a modern system, not even with DOSBox, or dual booting a previous version of Windows, or whatever, then out of interest what are the games? I bought my first PC in November 1996, so I didn't play too many DOS games, when I started PC gaming Windows games were starting to become common, and the PC games I love, be they DOS or Windows, all either work natively on Windows, or through DOSBox, or using third party Windows-native game engine ports (Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, etc).
Actually, that's not entirely true, at least two games I have refuse to work on my Windows 7 64-bit desktop; Detective Chess and Windows Scrabble, as they are both 16-bit games (at least according to their Windows 7 error messages), but I assumed I could run them in VMWare** and 32-bit Windows? I haven't bothered to find out, as I found a Flash/Java (I don't know the difference!) version of Detective Chess, and finding a good Scrabble version isn't exactly hard. Come to think of it, I might have more games that don't work on my desktop/laptop (both Windows 7 64-bit) but so far everything I've tried, except for Detective Chess and Windows Scrabble, has worked fine, albeit sometimes with a little tweaking, such as downloading an official/third party patch, or editing a game file.
** I can't use Windows 7's XP mode, as I only have Windows 7 Home Premium. Thankfully, VMWare is free and works well, from what I can see.