I made a dosbox :D

Post by **arion** » Fri Mar 09, 2007 1:49 pm

i know the dosbox emulator does a good job of emulating old dos games but it´s far from perfect. So i decided to get an old pc to run windows 95 the specs are

pentium 133mhz
128mb edo ram
1.2 gb hard drive
SoundBLASTER 16

2mb onboard vga

and i must say its just fun to play old dos games again such as Daggerfall,Dune2,Sierra adventure games. But it´s not without flaws windows 95 tends to crash alot but its funny to see the blue error screen again

Post by **ImportBoy** » Fri Mar 09, 2007 2:41 pm

Windows 95? You should stick with the good old DOS 6.22 & Windows 3.1. Probably would crash less on you

Post by **racketboy** » Fri Mar 09, 2007 3:45 pm

Back when I lived in California, I had a Pentium 100 that I found in a dumpster. It was a Compaq office computer that was pretty small and fanless. It was so nimble and quiet. It's a shame I didn't have room for it when I moved across the country...

Congrats on your setup

Post by **Mozgus** » Fri Mar 09, 2007 4:14 pm

A recieved a system similar to that, and win95 is the only OS it will accept and run decently. How do I go about getting dos games to run well in it? Usually I cant get sound at all, and the graphics are very bland colors with terrible frame rates.

Post by **arion** » Fri Mar 09, 2007 5:23 pm

Mozgus wrote:A recieved a system similar to that, and win95 is the only OS it will accept and run decently. How do I go about getting dos games to run well in it? Usually I cant get sound at all, and the graphics are very bland colors with terrible frame rates.

the bad framerate could be because windows is using the default vga display drivers. So finding the right driver for the graphic card should solve that http://www.driverguide.com/ is a good source for old drivers. But some dos games run very slow in windows 95 so booting to dos could help.

As for the sound..dos games usually need have the sound card set up manually look for exe files like "install" "setsound""setup" or anything similar in the games folder and you should get a menu for selecting a sound card and setting up the correct irq and dma channels.

Post by **arion** » Fri Mar 09, 2007 5:29 pm

ImportBoy wrote:Windows 95? You should stick with the good old DOS 6.22 & Windows 3.1. Probably would crash less on you

that would be an ideal setup but unfortunetly i dont have dos 6.22 or win 3.1 on disks anywhere that and im not even sure if i know how to setup such a system but it would be fun to try

Post by **Perseid** » Fri Mar 09, 2007 7:13 pm

1) You can configure 95 to boot up to DOS and use the command WIN to load Windows just like 3.1. So 95 is probably a better choice because there are more games for 95 than 3.1. And you can still run the old DOS games.

2) 128MB of RAM on a P-133? Hahah.

3) Mozgus, are you running the DOS games inside of 95? If so, that would be your problem, as that rarely works right. It's been many years, but I believe it's a setting in win.ini or boot.ini or something like that. Add BootGUI=0 and the computer will boot to DOS, not 95.

I've thought about building a retro machine. Almost the exact same one as you did. But then I'd need a place to put it. And with DosBox out and being awesome there really aren't that many old games I can't play.

Post by **Mozgus** » Fri Mar 09, 2007 9:04 pm

Perseid wrote:1) You can configure 95 to boot up to DOS and use the command WIN to load Windows just like 3.1. So 95 is probably a better choice because there are more games for 95 than 3.1. And you can still run the old DOS games.

2) 128MB of RAM on a P-133? Hahah.

3) Mozgus, are you running the DOS games inside of 95? If so, that would be your problem, as that rarely works right. It's been many years, but I believe it's a setting in win.ini or boot.ini or something like that. Add BootGUI=0 and the computer will boot to DOS, not 95.

I've thought about building a retro machine. Almost the exact same one as you did. But then I'd need a place to put it. And with DosBox out and being awesome there really aren't that many old games I can't play.

Hmm, it's probably not worth it anyway. Most of these games have good console ports to 16 and 32 bit systems. I'll live.

Post by **arion** » Sat Mar 10, 2007 11:27 am

Perseid wrote:
I've thought about building a retro machine. Almost the exact same one as you did. But then I'd need a place to put it. And with DosBox out and being awesome there really aren't that many old games I can't play.

i know space can be an issue and thats why i got a kvm switch so i can share the same monitor,mouse and keyboard for two pc´s

Post by **ImportBoy** » Sat Mar 10, 2007 2:49 pm

i know space can be an issue and thats why i got a kvm switch so i can share the same monitor,mouse and keyboard for two pc´s

I've been considering this setup myself but I've heard some bad things about KVMs. Do you notice that you are losing any video quality? Or keyboard/mouse performance issues? What model are you using?