I don't remember Pinball Dreams performance, but Pinball Fantasies (being a sequel to Dreams) runs totally fine on 286, even playing pcm music on PC speaker, which is a cpu intensive task.

Sorry can't quite remember what was the issue with the game, but it definitely runs on 286... Although it's slow especially with sound.
I would first try without emm memory and no sound.
I think there are different versions floating around... Floppy verion was easy to get working cd rerelease was picky... Or another way around.

Iirc some of these DOS pinball titles sometimes did weird stuff with their video output. I'm totally just guessing but maybe it's iterating through video modes trying to find one capable of doing... something... before eventually timing out and falling back to a lowest common denominator one? Have you tried different graphics cards yet?

elszgensa wrote on 2024-12-31, 13:52:

Iirc some of these DOS pinball titles sometimes did weird stuff with their video output. I'm totally just guessing but maybe it's iterating through video modes trying to find one capable of doing... something... before eventually timing out and falling back to a lowest common denominator one? Have you tried different graphics cards yet?

These DOS pinball games used mode X or a variation of it by tweaking the VGA registers, not iterating through video modes.

i tried a voodoo 3 and geforce 4 card in pentium 3 and both did the same thing.
The packard bell is using intergated video .. its has only isa slots.. and dont have a video video card for it.

also the monitor shows its recieving a signal , just does show anything for a long time..

Floppy verion works just fine with no memory managers or mouse, so just conventional memory.
For sound I had to select bare sound blaster... I've got sb16 installed on my p90 setup.

There are different versions of Pinball Dreams with different video modes.

A Pinball Dreams demo version and Pinball Dreams Spanish version run in bog standard Mode 13h 320x200:

The Pinball Dreams English version acquires a settings menu that can be entered from the table menu by pressing F5:

If "High Res" is selected (that is the default in this version), the game runs in that weird tweaked video mode of theirs. It is not Mode X (unchained 320x240), but a vertically enhanced version, unchained 320x350 that they conjured up for the game:

If "Low Res" is selected, then the game uses the Mode 13h 320x200 video mode as the demo and Spanish version above.

Pinball Fantasies shares this same low/high resolution setting in the game's setting menu, and applies these same video modes in the game with that setting.

The game is authored in square pixels.

As for hardware requirements, yeah, this game is very lightweight. It uses hardware scrolling to avoid needing to do heavy repaints, so even the crummy slow VGA graphics cards like Trident 8800CS and Oak Oti 037C are able to run this game at good performance.