You can try to install a virtual machine with XP on it. I'm not sure if Windows 8 is better or worse at that than Windows 7 is. I ended up installing Oracle's virtual machine software and Windows XP in my Windows 7 machine, but I still haven't finished getting it to accept my actual video and sound card drivers rather than using generic ones. I know one person at least has succeeded at doing so.

Dual booting to Windows XP would not be preferable because of your octal core, I doubt that XP supports it. I have an FX 8150 in my Windows 7 machine as well and I just haven't tried installing XP on a separate partition yet, I built a 90s game box for my "old" game needs instead.

thanks sheath, i follow exactyl same way with installing virtualbox and xp. but i need install xp natively 😒

How about DOSBox? 😀

Dosbox doesn't help with all Windows games, and requires a ton of tweaking when it does allow for the game to be installed.

er um.. Do you still have the parts from your trusty old XP/P4-2.4? You could buy a case and whatever miscellaneous other gear you might need cheaply and "join the party" - build yourself a nice little retro rig to run the old stuff sans VM/Patches/Tweaks...

sheath wrote:

Dosbox doesn't help with all Windows games, and requires a ton of tweaking when it does allow for the game to be installed.

jagged alliance and duke3d are dos games..

Indeed. They are even for sale at http://www.gog.com if one does not want to bother trying to set them up.

There are better alternatives, like eDuke32 or the Back in Action remake for Jagged Alliance, though those might not be an authentic experience.

sheath wrote:

I ended up installing Oracle's virtual machine software and Windows XP in my Windows 7 machine, but I still haven't finished getting it to accept my actual video and sound card drivers rather than using generic ones.

As far as i know it can't virtual machines do not work for games. I tried 98 virtual machine and when i play dos games in full screen it goes all weird and if windowed it lags. then again i use vmware.

also there is an HD mod for duke nukem 3d with an updated game engine for newer machines.

Jorpho wrote:

Indeed. They are even for sale at http://www.gog.com if one does not want to bother trying to set them up.

There are better alternatives, like eDuke32 or the Back in Action remake for Jagged Alliance, though those might not be an authentic experience.

I have «Back in Action» and although it's not a bad game per se, the original Jagged Alliance games by Sir-Tech were a lot better in my humble opinion.

cdoublejj wrote:

sheath wrote:

I ended up installing Oracle's virtual machine software and Windows XP in my Windows 7 machine, but I still haven't finished getting it to accept my actual video and sound card drivers rather than using generic ones.

As far as i know virtual machines do not work for games (at least not well. I tried 98 virtual machine and when i play dos games in full screen it goes all weird and if windowed it lags. then again i use vmware.

also there is an HD mod for duke nukem 3d with an updated game engine for newer machines.

sheath wrote:

I ended up installing Oracle's virtual machine software and Windows XP in my Windows 7 machine, but I still haven't finished getting it to accept my actual video and sound card drivers rather than using generic ones. I know one person at least has succeeded at doing so.

I'm quite sure that can't be done. That one other person you are referring to may have been thinking of something different.

cdoublejj wrote:

As far as i know it can't virtual machines do not work for games. I tried 98 virtual machine and when i play dos games in full screen it goes all weird and if windowed it lags.

There is no hardware 3D acceleration available in Windows 98 in any virtual machine presently.

rain wrote:

jagged alliance, duke nukem 3d old dos games like these.

do not use oracles virtual machine all these games are dos games dosbox is what you need.
you should of listened to hal-9000 not sheath

thanks davros. but can i get best performance on dosbox?

best ? no, but good enough

Sorry, I assumed he would want to try some Windows 95/98 games at some point and I have run into problems even installing them in Windows 7 64-bit. Also, the amount of time I have had to spend individually optimizing dosbox per game seemed like a waste considering the performance I got at the end. Here is a Tomb Raider Comparison video I did last year that gradually prompted me to build my 90s box.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ev6HmOvvVQ

As for Oracle's virtualbox, I think it isn't possible to share the actual video/sound hardware but the guy who pointed me to it swore that he did. At any rate, virtualbox at least supports 3D Acceleration through emulation/mapping/whatever.

However VirtualBox would only do it on 2000+ guest OSes (not win9x) and even if support were provided for win9x, its Wined3d wrapper is also designed for 2000+

Also

Qbix wrote:

jagged alliance and duke3d are dos games..

sheath wrote:

Dual booting to Windows XP would not be preferable because of your octal core, I doubt that XP supports it.

32-bit XP supports up to 32 cores.

d1stortion wrote:

sheath wrote:

Dual booting to Windows XP would not be preferable because of your octal core, I doubt that XP supports it.

32-bit XP supports up to 32 cores.

Thanks! I didn't know it went that high, since it only supports 3.5GB of RAM. I remember it being fairly poorly optimized for quad core CPUs when I decided to move up from dual core and that is about it.

Yeah but that's a limitation that you have with any 32-bit OS. 😉 As far as SMP optimization goes I have seen benchmarks where XP performed slightly better and some where Vista/7 was ahead. So unless proven otherwise I'd say they're equal in this department.

It's a bit of a shame that XP x64 was so exotic...