I actually played all these games at my mom's house whenever I stayed over a couple of nights until last year.

She had my old p3 @ 700mhz that ran all these games real good. I recently upgraded my own kit so i gave her old one and actually got my 58yr old mom hooked on Bejeweled 2 as a bonus I'm real proud of hearing my mom talking about the "just one more game" effect 😀

I just haven't had the time or motivation to set up that old p3 somewhere in my own home though, but I will definitely do this, I need to get my mech fix sometime soon because it has been to long since I properly walked around in one. I'm not counting Perpetuum here as it is not "proper" mech gameplay)

HG2 will do the trick I think 🙂

Yup I keep an old 98 laptop, it was in fact my first PC bought second hand from some one I worked with back in 2000 when I was testing the dark side of computing.

Played Baulder gate 1 &2 Fallout 2 Blade Runner Monkey island 3 and Privateer2 among others.

Being using it lately to play Jedi Knight Dark Forces 2 and DS9 The Fallen.

I dont tend to have any trouble playing older games on my win7x64 pc. I use dosbox or scumm for the older games or even fan modifications to increase resolution and be played on modern systems.

well dan, right dan,

i do the same and was wondering wat's the clou behind these games.

most you should get running under dos-box, there are games that are quite difficult to setup but most will work, personally i got all my old games running (with a few exceptions that are homebrew progs and need win'98).

though if it's a DOS program it will work, if it's a win'98...

some help for win '98 progs to run under XP at least, is the... (god there is a black wall in my brain)

ok, some system compatibility manager (not the common one, but included to XP), you can assign from there each compatibility setting separate, that helps in most cases to get '98 & Me games running (there is also a table of games and how to setup the manager for them available in the web, same brand uses often similar settings).

further it helps often (don't laugh it's true) to simply copy the game from the CD-rom to your HD, install the game then from there but make shure the program will assume the game will run later from CD.

it's the only way to use standart or enhanced systemcompatibility for a setup.exe.

it could help sometimes if you get a error message that some .dll is missing or causing a halt, to look out for the "suspicious" .dll, compare it if possible to the old from '98, if there is a difference, try to copy the old .dll to the games folder that can help allready and will in many cases in compatibility mode, since the game runs then in a own environment and will take the games path to the search path (that's why TWPGA2k only in english in compatibility mode).

two progs where this trick does the clue, NFS4 and TWPGA2k(funny, you have to copy the game to HD to install under '98 compatibility mode, but the game will run only in "normal" mode, while the course architect only runs proper in compatibility mode, this on my actual machine. on my older it runs in both modes but only in english when compatibility mode is selected).

in general it needs patience and a lot of investigations in the web to find a solution, but you will find one, i'm shure.

it can be a sisyphus sometimes, because i found out that even on the same OS, on different hardware sometimes a solution helps sometimes not. i can only comment WINDOZE!

i have two times XPsp3 installed on two diff. machines, guess... the above listed two games have different setups to make them run (same OS! what a heck).

as example to get NFS4 running on the actual machine i needed to edit the registry, on my older machine it was not needed to do so. it has cost me again some investigations to find a hint that this and that should be tried then it MIGHT work.

you see, it MIGHT work for one on one machine, for another one using exactly the same OS it didn't, WINDOZE!

and don't believe that this will be better on newer system or in future, it will get worse!

don't forget it's....

ok, intel

of course some DOS games need to be setup via DOS-box if played under DOS-box

i did so for FFE (original, later shareware version don't need that), it's the simpliest way to get the vids running even under DOS-box (there is binary that includes the setup prefs and paths).

as a examample:

i copied the complete game to a CD-rom, like it would have been released yesterday.

setup DOS-box with a mounted CD-rom and proper settings for the game.

opened the console and executed the installer from the console.

installed the game to (emulated)drive C: (in case of FFE this was important, can't tell you why).

ready.

later you can copy the game elsewhere, as long as executed from DOS-box it will assume it runs on drive C: and CD-rom is present or you selected to install the vids to HD, it will use the proper path then (in emulated drive C: of course, which reflects your games folder).

it's easy to imagine that some won't run if not installed under the "proper OS".

most, really most VGA games will work, older CGA or EGA are more difficult to run and require a exact emulation of the cpu and peripherals, while most VGA games are tolerant and will work in all VGA modes with different set cpu or peripherals.

sadly i can't offer no "all in one" solution, because there is no, each game needs on each machine a new solution (at least many).

i have read my own website to search for some infos, well it's true what i wrote there,

it's not the fault of developers, neither of producers or distributors.

it's only the rotten windows that's responsible for this hick hack.

but ok, if it wouldn't be that way (the hick hack), we would still use old '98, MS would be as less rich as they are, and we would stay less grey haired (that's why i cut off mine, you can't the the grey ones then) 😆 .

Well pot, right pot, 😉

I've been trying to get FFE running on my wii with dosbox. 🙂

Unfortunately it crashes at the start of a new game, not sure why.. Is there anything special you need to do to get FFE running in dosbox?

FFE runs fine with DosBox (even experimental releases, like the one with D3D support). So there is something wrong, with your version of DosBox (see what version is used as a basis for the Wii DosBox. The current DosBox version is 0.74 but you are fine with 0.72 0r 0.73), or the FFE version you have.

I got FFE to run on Win XP with no dosbox. There is a mod for both FFE and Frontier to run under windows.

However, the games that refuse to run properly for me are Wing Commander and WC Prophecy and also Privateer - The Darkening. The game runs nice but a 30 second cutscene manage to run in about 3 seconds from start to finish. Maybe something to do with the codec that's used but it's really annoying. I just wondered if anyone managed to find a work-around.

Hello Tryst

Best place to look would be on Wing Commander site.

http://www.wcnews.com/techsupport.shtml

For the Prophecy there are a couple of fixes, to make the game playable with WinXP. (You will find them at Wing Commander CIC. Look for HCL fixes http://www.wcnews.com/techsupport.shtml )

Privateer - The Darkening has a very nusty bug, in the Win95 version (no frame limiter). So you have to find the Dos Version and try it with DosBox. (I will try to also ,give it a go, if I have time).

Thanks Captain. Im 90% sure wii-dosbox is 0.73, so perhaps the wii just isnt man enough...maybe not enough memory or something I dunno...

Ive had a few other games going on it, like Dune and Starflight and they were fine, but daggerfall brought the wii to its knees 🙂

Have you tried to raise the cpu cicles?

Now that's a pleasnt thought. Dagerfall (and Wing Commander Privateer), with a Wii Mote. BTW "Privateer 2" runs fine with the 0.73 vesrsion of DosBox (although I have some minor problems calibrating my joystick 😳 ).

Yes I tried to raise cpu cycles, but I have read there may be a few other options to try, like changing these settings to:

# memsize

# ems=false

# xms=false

# umb=false

But I have yet to get round to trying that.

Some of the more advanced dos games though are just too much for the poor old wii.

So far the games I have got working on the wii at an acceptable speed are:

Starflight 1 + 2, Alien Legacy, MOO2(just about runs ok) 😀 , Star Control, Dune 2(that was fun on the wii) and I think I got magic carpet going at one time too.

I cant remember if daggerfall worked and was just too slow, or if it had a similar crash to what I get with FFE. But someone will probably end up porting DaggerXL to the wii I would think.

Privateer 2 could be a good one to try out. I cant remember if that needs a keyboard though, as the wii-dosbox support for keyboards is sporradic at best. It works best with games that use a mouse or joystick.