I've seen a few of the old DOS demos back then, but I'm by no means an expert. I've found two demos, Ctstoast, and Machines, the winner and runner-up of Assembly 96 I think, and have had some success running them on my Athlon 1.33 GHz, 512 Mb, Ati Radeon 9600 Pro. I do admit I use an ISA Soudblaster, the AWE 64, as I'm still perfectly happy with that.

I had to boot to my DOS 6.22 partition to get them to work though... It was interesting to run DOS again, it all came flooding back when I started Machines, it complained that it didn't see any EMS memory, so I removed NOEMS from the EMM line in config.sys. So that was easy... Ctstoast was slightly harder, as it crashed with an EMM error. I have seen that happen often with DOS programs, so I then tried to boot DOS without the EMM, as that often used to work, and indeed it did in this case.

The video card shouldn't be a problem really, as Radeons support DOS video modes, and I had indeed no video issues as far as I know (I don't know what the demos are supposed to look like, but they looked fine to me). The soundcard can be a problem, as modern cards don't seem to support DOS very well, if at all, but my AWE 64 worked OK. Mind you, I had to use the SB DOS PNP manager (remember that one?) to get full support for it, but once I had that set up, DOS programs ran fine.

A couple of handy keys to use when booting DOS are Shift and F8. Shift will bypass (ignore) the startup files config.sys and autoexec.bat, which is useful for a quick test, but because I need to run a couple of SB DOS programs to support the AWE 64, I often use F8, which enables you to run or skip the startup commands. This way you can only load those commands you need to run the program. I used this key to skip loading the EMM manager, and the CD-ROM drivers as well (you want to grab as much memory as you can when running DOS!).

Interesting topic yeah. The best old demos used a lot of neat tricks which were hardware depending and stuff. But lately dosbox has been moving into a good direction with this.. I remember around .59 and .60 times I tried running some of the early 90's party winners and half of them ran fine.. There has been a lot of development too with dosbox and I Bet a lot greater part would work now. Well I dont know I didn't try too many.

If you want to try to run them in REAL dos mode then you have to play with the memory settings and stuff a lot. And some of them will propably never run on today's machines. They just had to squueze all the last juice of the hardware to get all the finest tricks run. But yeah I think dosbox is a good thing to try first.

Darn I should really read the dates before replying anywhere.. But well atleast someone might be looking into this 😀

PANIC one of the best from Future Crew runs awful in DOSBox lately especially in the latest CVS. The intro where F U T U R E C R E W (letter by letter) is suppose to fly by is slowed to a crawl (cycles have no effect on it) which seems to be a rendering problem.

Also Scroller effects are broken in DOSBox and some other Plasma Rendering Bugs.

Although my brother has told me even whene we had the 386 it was still hard to get it to run. I do wish to see the demo properly but what can I say.

Although you should see Unreal or Second Reality. (There is a rendering problem in Unreal at one spot with DOSBox in the latest CVS Version as well which is the VectorBalls scene) DOSBox 0.61 was able to emulate it but lately the CVSes have been breaking many of the PC DOS DEMOS.

Panic may be a bit of a problem. It starts, but runs way too fast, and then hangs displaying a red volcano. On the other hand, after enabling only the essential drivers, Second Reality, and Unreal seem to run just fine. I don't know how exactly they're supposed to look, but they run to completion, and visually there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with them.

I dual booted to DOS 6.22. Computer: 1.33 GHz AMD Athlon, 512 Mb, ATI 9600 Pro, Soundblaster AWE 64.