Between Dos and Windows

[RCBH928]

Hello

I am just wondering if there is any advantage of playing a windows game over Dos. Some games offer to play on both platforms. I am not sure how that works but is there any kind of advantage of one platform over the other?
Specially in graphics...I was looking in point-click adventures.

I got a mac, so I was wondering if the DOS box is going to do r do I have to install full XP.

[arion]

For point and click games ScummVM is the simplest solution. Since it supports both dos and windows games.

[RCBH928]

yeah but there are other genres too
and I do not think it supports all games

[arion]

Thats true but scummVM does support a lot of good games. And it doesnt take much space so it's worth it to have it installed.

As for playing other dos based games the dosbox emulator does have a good support for dos games and i would recomend using that instead of running them from windows. Unless you are using older windows like 95 or 98 and the reason why dos games work well under them is because those editions of windows are still based on dos unlike xp wich is Nt based.

You can run dos games under windows xp but since all windows xp does is the same as dosbox it emulates the enviroment and in most cases does a worse job of it.

So in a nutshell windows xp with dosbox is the ideal solution since you get support for later windows based games and you can emulate dosgames.

[Hatta]

A lot of games in that period were written for DOS, and had a windows port hastily thrown together. Quest for Glory IV comes to mind. The DOS version had animated cursor icons, and much, much cooler music.

I'm sure there are other games that had extras thrown in for Win32 that didn't make it to the first DOS version, but nothing comes to mind immediately. You kind of have to decide on a case by case basis.

If you do install windows, you'll probably have better luck running Windows 9x in a VM than running XP in classic mode. You won't even have to reboot. Also, if it's a Win 3.1 game you're looking at, DOSBOX will run Windows 3.1 just fine.

[t0yrobo]

Probably your best bet would be running windows 95 in virtualbox. At worst some 3d games may give you problems, but everything else should be fine, plus you get dos and windows.

[sneth]

Probably your best bet would be running windows 95 in virtualbox. At worst some 3d games may give you problems, but everything else should be fine, plus you get dos and windows.

this is the best idea. especially if you are on a Mac. also, classic mac had most of the same adventure games from the day.

the only reason to install DOS is for the games that require extended memory, which wasn't used in later versions of windows.

[RCBH928]

this is getting confusing
I thought all previous games on windows can be played through windows xp

[sneth]

this is getting confusing
I thought all previous games on windows can be played through windows xp

no. it might help if you give us a better idea what games you plan on playing. 1980's? or 1995?, or 1998?

xp doesnt play many Win98 and 95 games. There are usually backward ways of getting it done, but it's usually easier to just have a virtual disk.

[MrPopo]

I know for a fact that Windows XP cannot even install, much less play, the Battlepack version of Mechwarrior 2 (DirectX 2 baby!) and getting Mechwarrior 2 Mercenaries to work is very hit and miss and requires some patching.