First post, by The Lord of the Flies
- Rank
- Newbie
Hi! What a wonderful world this abandonware stuff on the inet is! Kewl site too! 😀
I have some old DOS games on original CD-ROM, a few of which I've been testin' and tweakin' to get to work on my computer. Basically, my results for all of them have been that they run rather well but not perfectly. Mainly, the trouble is that they run slower than normal, but fortunately not very much slower. This mostly results in "pops" in the sound, little skips that occur about every 1 to 3 seconds. But I don't mean that the whole of the problem is just the sound: The games as a whole run slowly. Seems that, maybe, if the running-speed of the game were increased, there would be no sound problems. It helps significantly if I run them from the Command Prompt rather than right-clicking on the icon from Windows. But still slightly slow even in that case.
I've been working on three of my games....
* Warcraft: Orcs & Humans
This one functions the best of the three. In fact it it runs pretty close to perfect...well more than the other two.... The slowness (from the Prompt) isn't so bad that I get the pops in the sound. But the music seems a but too deep-sounding, like a record not spinning quite fast enough. (In the game's Setup program I chose Adlib for the music having tried the other choices. Adlib seem to yield the best results.) The rest of the sound, the "digitized" seems better than that but just, maybe, a...um..."micron" below normal. (I chose SoundBlaster Pro for digitized sounds in the game's Setup.) The gameplay is a little slow. I can tell mainly by the flying arrows and spears that "jerk" to their targets, as if maybe a couplea frames are being skipped.
* Dune II: The Battle for Arrakis
I installed this game to my HD. Once again the game is noticably slower when booted from Windows. That's bad because that's the only(?) way to get the voice-overs to work. If I boot from the Prompt, the game is quite faster but there's no voice-sounds. Because of this, it's difficult to determine which soundcard is best to chose in the game's Setup program--I tried several options. From Windows I get the pops; from the Prompt, no. These no "frame-skipping" in the video, but it just runs slower for that lack...slower than Warcraft! It's as if the game is making more demands on the system than Warcraft, but that's wierd: Dune II is two years older than Warcraft.... 😕 This game can also be installed to run from the CD-ROM rather than the HD. I have not experimented with that very thouroughly yet.
* Dune
This one runs from the CD drive only, "installing" very few files to one's HD (just a single .BAT file containing code for your configuration, and your saved games). Mainly this game's problems come from whenever the CD is accessed. The intros and cinematic interludes have the typical 1-to-3-second-skip thing. During the game the only real problems come when I change to screens that change the music, which is most of them. The game hangs for about a-half-a-second as if waiting for the new music to come (from the CD) before actually changing to the new screen. I gotta tell ya though: My CD-R/W drive (it is D:\ on my computer) seems to have...issues of some kind. 😠 For one, on the front of the door it says "48x 16x 48x". 😠😠 But that should still be fast enough for this and many other games! OTOH, though, it oft-times claims to be "(Empty)" after I just inserted a CD! 😠😠😠 Using my DVD-ROM drive (drive E:\ ) doesn't change the game-situation any. (Hey! That drive has about the same issues as the D:\ drive! Hmmm...I think there is more to that than those two drives...hmmm....)
I am using WinXP Pro, an AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (runs about 1,667MHz), 256MB RAM (I'm not sure what kind), on-board sound (no extra soundcard), on-board video (no extra videocard) that offers 8MB 3D-VRAM of 3-D Now! technology. That's about all I know for sure about this system. But my DxDiag.txt is attached right down there. Maybe someone else can read all that....
I know next to nothing about DOS 'n stuff. Is there something else that I can tweak to maybe get these and other DOS games running perfectly, if possible? Is there anything I can do, even if that would mean buying new pieces of hardware?
Thanx in advance! 😀
...😵
