You don´t have to use any virtual machines to use dosbox, just install it on your windows 7, it will work great for playing old dos games once you get it configured right.

For all these games except Tomb Raider, you can also get enhanced Windows ports of them (Darkplaces for Quake, and Doomsday Engine for Doom 1 and Doom 2 are some examples, but there are many more out there for each one). Doom 3 should work plain with no problems.

Hi and welcome, 😀

Like they said use DosBox to play all the dos related games. It is the best ms-dos emulator around and it can play pretty much anything. I recommend to run the intro (just type "intro" in DosBox) and read all the information carefully since you have to assign (mount) driveletters and directories the unix way. If you can get around this it actually works simpler than real dos, because you don't need to make free memory and have to setup your soundcard in the config.ini and autexec.bat like you used to. By the way I have played and finished Tombraider and its expansionpack on DosBox, I think it was v0.73 since it was over a year ago, I only couldn't get it to run in 3dfx, but I've read that it should now be possible with Gulikoza's build and nGlide.

Also like filipetolhuizen said, some of the more popular games, FPS mostly, have been modified so they can run on modern systems and also have been enhanced to benefit from more powerful hardware. I only know a few like EDuke32 for Duke Nukem 3D and I know for certain there was one too for Hexen 2. But you can find many more, like Darkplaces for Quake or the Doomsday engine for Doom 1&2, Heretic and Hexen like filipetolhuizen mentioned. Best is to make some search queries about some games to see if something comes up.
Then there are glidewrappers to play most games that have 3dfx support without the need for the actual 3dfx (voodoo) hardware. The best 3dfxwrapper and only one that is supported at the moment afaik is nGlide. But there are others too, Zeckensack's and dgVoodoo. To use 3dfx with dosgames you need a special build of DosBox like the one from Gulikoza.

You mentioned you plan to use Virtual Machine, VMware or Virtualbox. Personally I can't really recommend it to play games since this software clearly isn't designed with (retro)gaming in mind. For instance Virtual Machine is fixed in it's hardware, like 2Mb videoram in Windows 98, so to start with you can't play anything with accellerated graphics with it. And the free versions of VMware and Virtualbox don't support USB, so if you want to hook up a joystick or gamepad you're screwed. Still, it can work in certain situations, but I have tried it and to me it wasn't worth the effort in the end. Best here is to search the web if it comes with a solution to run a game or ask here. ^^

Interesting links:

http://www.dosbox.com/

http://www.dengine.net/

http://eduke32.com/

http://www.zeus-software.com/galleries/nglide

http://www.si-gamer.net/gulikoza/

[Thread moved to DOS Section]

I've used flash drives through USB with the free Virtualbox distro. I've also run both Alice, and Soldier of Fortune 2 through the Direct X addons they offer for virtualbox. It all worked pretty well for that stuff.

Why would you do that when both games work fine in all versions of windows
I have both of them working in win7 x64

Shagittarius wrote:

I've used flash drives through USB with the free Virtualbox distro. I've also run both Alice, and Soldier of Fortune 2 through the Direct X addons they offer for virtualbox. It all worked pretty well for that stuff.

That's because the VMs only support modern DirectX versions ATM and only on XP/Vista/7 guests. Older D3D games won't work.

filipetolhuizen wrote:

Shagittarius wrote:

I've used flash drives through USB with the free Virtualbox distro. I've also run both Alice, and Soldier of Fortune 2 through the Direct X addons they offer for virtualbox. It all worked pretty well for that stuff.

That's because the VMs only support modern DirectX versions ATM and only on XP/Vista/7 guests. Older D3D games won't work.

What I could never get is, why? It shouldn't be THAT hard to implement support for older DirectX versions. I mean, aren't newer versions of DirectX supposed to be backwards compatible?

I do recommend using some source ports, they just work and look better, support more screen resolutions and fix bugs. For Quake I very much recommend Dark Places, check out http://quakeone.com for anything related to Quake , and also for Dark Places mods and support. There are also many other Quake source ports.

For Ultimate Doom, I recommend Risen 3D, or Chocolate Doom. I prefer the former. There is also many other source ports of doom.

For Duke Nukem, I highly recommend eduke32.

Glidos is also excellent for Tomb Raider, it has it's own sub forum on this board.

There's a few source ports for Wolfenstein (wolf4sdl is my favorite, there is also NewWolf and some others), other build engine games (Redneck Rampage, Shadow Warrior), Descent, etc.

Battlezone is also still supported by the author(s) with many updates, and works fine in native mode now.

Dosbox is great too for that original feeling, also comes highly recommended for almost ANY dos based game. You won't be able to run windows 95 or 98 games in it however. The only solution for that still, is to build a machine with older hardware which can support these games.

Cheers.