Thread 11946608

We had a pretty nice, mostly shitpost-free DOS games thread a week ago or so. Let's keep that up while expanding the topic a bit. Talk about your experiences and memories growing up with IBM PC-compatibles, DOS, and early versions of Windows. Your games, your hardware, your journey of learning and discovery, the bullshit you had to put up with just to get something to fucking run on your shitbox with way too little RAM - share it here.

>>11946608 (OP)
My relative had a Cyrix 386 machine in the early 90s. That's what I would play DOS games on for a few years until we got 486 with x2 CD-ROM an SB16.
Some early games I remember were: Airborne Ranger, Prince of Persia, Home Alone, Duck Tales, Tower Toppler, Bad Street Brawler. All pirated.
When we got CD-ROM, it was over - I would buy CDs with compilations of hundreds of games from pirates in a local flea market.
The thing with pirates was - you paid per medium, so, even though floppies were cheaper than CDs, a game on 10 floppies would be quite expensive.
The most expensive game I bought was probably Realms Of Arkania 2, which was something like 15 or 20 floppies. Didn't buy any multi CD games - missed out on all of FMV stuff, like Gabriel Knight 2, Phantasmagoria, Zork Nemesis, etc.
Started to use internet on dial-up. It was mostly Archie/ftp and Usenet at the time.
Called some BBSes around 96/97, but the scene wasn't that big in my country.
Played some MUDs around same time. Northern Lights is the one I remember.

>>11946608 (OP)
It is possible to play HoM&M3 with less than 24 MB RAM, but screen transitions will be painfully slow.
I found that out by forcing the game to run on my 16 MB RAM machine.

>>11946608 (OP)
>dos
i just wanted to play dinosaur safari and click on things like i did when i was a kid
dosbox is a shitload of fuck and will let me destroy my entire HDD if i fuck up.
i got commander keen going but no dice on dino.

i also wanted microsoft bob
and encarta discs up and running but the software is just TOO SHITTY

>>11946693
DOSBox is decidedly NOT what you want to use for non-game software. Even edutainment is not a sure bet on it. For those, you would ideally set up a PCem or 86Box machine and install Windows 95 or 98, which will run almost anything up to the late 90's without any problems.

>>11946706
i was thinking maybe an old thinkpad or ibm tower
MAYBE a nuc pc if i have extra money to waste on it
i will eventually get around to it
i atleast have the ISO hoarded and backed up

>>11946608 (OP)
Blood & Magic.
Master of Orion 2.
those are the only DOS games I remember. I still play MOO2 sometimes.

>>11946712
those will do it but i would say no to both since i own both, i have a 2002 thinkpad pentiumM (pentium4) 2ghz, 16mb radeon7000, soundmax audio, will work with dos games in windows but not pure dos since audio is not dos compatible also no FM synth, any thinkpad after this wont be compatible and anything before will be underpowered, ibm pcs are for business use, not suitable for gaming, the one i have is from an ibm netvista, the chipset is an 845GL, the GL means the agp slot is non functional for graphics cards only usable as an extension to the onboard video, also has the same soundmax audio as thinkpads, and one of the pci slots it blocked by capacitors making it unusable, absolute shit.

get a cheap 478 socket pentium 4, with an intel/SiS/VIA chipset, if it has sata good!, get a cheap nvidia fx5200, and a cheap sound blaster live or audigy.

also dont buy OEM boards, make sure the bios is from the same manufacturer as the board, eg. asus board with asus bios, not asus board with hewlett packard bios.

avoid hewlett packard, packard bell, IBM, Dell, Compaq, etc no name brands, build your own from stock parts for best compatibility, name brands remove options from the bios making them useless for any purpose other than what THEY intended.

>massive library for DOS
>horrible slop-to-quality ratio, nearly all unplayable garbage
>a handful of obscenely good games that are all the more insane given the years they were released
DOS was the weirdest console of all

May as well show off my setup while I'm here.

Win9X Gaming PC (that was my grandma's home computer from around 2002 until 2007) Specs:
>Windows 98SE with official updates
>Pentium III 1ghz
>OS on 16GB CF-IDE adapter with a 128GB IDE HDD for spare storage
>Nvidia GeForce 4 MX 4000 64MB with 53.04 drivers (irredeemable dogshit by 2003 standards but it can run Quake III Arena and UT99 like a champ so it's fine)
>512MB SDRAM
I enjoy using this computer for DOS games and Win9X games obviously, compatibility issues can be a bitch though which is why I have...

Dell XPS Specs:
>Windows 10 with custom Windows XP theme
>Core i7 4th gen I think
>1TB SATA SSD
>AMD HD 8770 with custom CRTemu drivers for GroovyMAME
>16GB DDR3 RAM
Very convenient system for emulating other vintage computers I'll never hope to afford like the PC-98 or Amiga or whatever but still want to play with period accurate hardware and a 4:3 CRT display, also great for MAME emulation and playing more intensive Windows XP era games or DOS/Win9X games with compatibility problems on the normal rig

2005 Mac Mini:
>1.4ghz PowerPC CPU
>Dualboot with OS9 and OSX Tiger
>80GB HDD
>1GB RAM
Very nice for playing Mac exclusives, certain games with better Mac versions, and Apple II emulation since I feel autistic about running Apple software on non-Apple hardware.

>>11947520
comfy setup

>>11947520
I feel like permanently printing "radiation" right on the front of your product isn't the best marketing strategy

>>11947826
just a lil bit innit

>>11947446
This is true, though said ratio got better as time went on, I think. The early to mid 80's era was really rough, but it got a lot better once VGA and sound blaster support became ubiquitous by around 1990.

bump

Should have made a general retro PC thread, I have some questions but it's not DOS era related.

>>11949576
So make one yourself?

ONE MORE

Anybody got any more clean BIOS splash rips, or know the right way to do it?

>>11946608 (OP)
Gunship 2000 on 5.25 disks
Red Baron
Skyroad
Wolfstein
Doom
Infocom text adventures like planet fall, leather goddessses of phobos, hitchikers guide and rescue from rama by sierra, the dig, lost eden and the original dune game. I was building and selling PCs in the early 90s using machines that were being sold off at recievers auctions, I had them all from the 8086s through the 286s and teh 386s DXs with co processors and later the 486s SXs. This was back when you had to set the IRQ and base address on cards by moving jumpers. I liked DOS 5 best but was mainly making wordprocessors and printers work together for typing pools. It was a break form working indevelopment before I went back to it. Wordstar and wordperfect etc and impact printers

>>11947520
based og hardware always best

My first DOS PC was an 80286 at 16 Mhz with a 40 MB hard drive and beautiful VGA graphics. It was made by GoldStar (which later became LG I think).

Played a lot of Railroad Tycoon, Wolf3d, Star Control 2, and Civilization on that thing.

It died when its failing power supply fried the motherboard. I kept the hard drive as a souvenir, and even tried to pull data off of it last year, but it must've seized up.

>>11949625
I don't wanna.

Around ~1993 my dad bought us a second-hand 486 SX which ran MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11, and had only a floppy drive and no sound card. A friend from school had the latest PC with a CD-ROM drive and he was playing Sim City 2000 on it. After he showed me this game I couldn't think of anything else. I drew cities on paper all the time, imagined the problems they would have in-game and how to fix them. But I couldn't install it on my computer because it was on CD. One day my friend copied the game on floppy disks for me. It fit on just a few diskettes; maybe a dozen. I was so fucking happy. When I went home I put the first diskette in, ran INSTALL.EXE and was already salivating when the installation screen showed up. The installation started! Unbelievable. I was sure it would ask for the second disk like every other floppy-based game, right ? Wrong. An error message soon destroyed my hopes and dreams and I went back to drawing cities on paper like the eternal poorfag that I was doomed to be. Retard me wouldn't have thought of copying the floppies to the hard drive before running the installation there. It probably would have worked.

>>11953895
Man, I don't blame you. All that shit was borderline magic to me as a young kid. I didn't even begin to understand what the fuck was going on with computers until our school got a guy to come in to actually teach us about what's inside of a computer and how they work through programs and operating systems.

Bros I played a turn-based JRPG-style game (you control a character in a top-down style map, you start in a castle and the king sends you on a quest, you go to the overworld to explore and enter random turn-based encounters dragon quest style) in the late 90s or early 2000s. I downloaded it for free so I assume it's either freeware or shareware and it required fiddling with the sound card settings to get the audio to work and I assume it was on DOS. Does anyone remember this? I drew you a map. (The lower gray blob is the castle you start in, the upper gray blob is a village you can enter after you go through the mountain range through the cave, the green area is a forest with a bunch of enemies)

It reminded me of RPGmaker games except older

>>11954882
sup tanoc

>>11954882
Could be an OHRRPGCE game.

do you guys still have that premade PCem machine with tons of games

>>11955338
I can upload it again, but I've been slowly working on a much-needed update using a better hardware configuration, a light version of Windows 98 that overall seems to work and perform better, and more games, together with an optional DOS pack to go along with it.

>>11955464
Ok then I'll wait, cheers

>>11954882
ALERT ALERT ALERT
THIS USER IS A FINN
REPEAT MESSAGE
THIS USER IS A DIRTY FINN
BE AWARE THAT HE MAY TRY TO LURE YOU INTO HIS NAKED SAUNA WITH KARHU
ALERT ALERT ALERT

Fine tale, chap.

>>11946608 (OP)
I remember having enough RAM in my system back then with 4MB for a 286-12 and 8MB when it was upgraded to a 386DX-40, but the conventional 640k was taken up by all sorts of TSRs like Logitech mice. I never did learn what the buffers and (I think it was) stacks lines in config.sys do, so I set them both to 50. Young and without any manuals or instructors, I just messed around to figure stuff out (yes, I formatted everything and that's how I learned I needed the trio of command.com, config.sys, and autoexec.bat) without the aid of the internet. There were all sorts of cool games I got with some random group's executable that had cool music and visuals crediting all sorts of handle/callsign/nick that has now faded away which I'd love to see again.

Some noice systems in this thread.

The two systems I have in the flat... a PII233 and my favorite - a 66mhz Packard Bell.
I have a few CRTs but I prefer to not burn them up fiddling around.

>>11958264
Is that a Packard Bell Legend? My cousin used to have one, except his was 50 MHz I think. I fucking loved that PC, mostly because it actually had a sound card and CD-ROM, and it came with a bunch of cool games like the Best of Windows Entertainment Pack, Mega Race, 3D Dinosaur Adventure, and Encarta 97. Shit was so cash.

>>11958310
>Encarta
I installed Encarta on an 86Box machine I was messing around with and I ended up looking at random articles for at least half an hour
There's something soulful about it. These days Wikipedia has infinitely more articles but I like how Encarta has stuff like little animations explaining how things work or little audio clips and such. Every articles seems more meaningful

>>11947398
I also have an AGP slot.

>>11958459
Yeah, I think part of it was due to the fact that multimedia was seen as this amazing new thing that actually wowed people, and so they leaned into it hard in applications that took advantage of it as a selling point. Nowadays, most people (kids included) just can't be arsed to actually delve that deep into things. Even Wikipedia is probably too much of a slog for many attention spans today. Much easier to just ask AI for the info you need and call it a day.

>>11955834
I'm also waiting on the latest stable release of 86Box, which will be later this month. Ideally I'll have the new pack ready by then. It's going to be a BIG release with tons of improvements, so I think it's worth waiting for that. PCem will still be included for performance, of course.

>>11959864
>latest stable release of 86Box, which will be later this month
huh, didn't know that. tried the NDR quite a while back and didn't really see any difference compared to the old recompiler. looking forward to the new stable, suppose I'll try it again.

>>11959931
Take this with a grain of salt, but here's a thread where a guy tested a ton of games and came to the conclusion NDR is better in most cases:
https://github.com/86Box/86Box/discussions/5757

>>11958459
I have a big box copy of encarta 98 anon, it lives with my big box MS oss and big vox pc games

>>11955989>>11954882

finns are based imo

>>11958310

It's an A940-4x4E520R - Pentium60(@66 mhz).

>>11947520
>low radiation
>mfw when I never had CRTs with this label

>>11959864
>>11959931
>>11959938
It's also going to have the new built-in manager if I'm not mistaken

>>11946608 (OP)
I remember loving to pull the holes off the dot matrix printer paper after it printed something. We did have some games too.

I was fortunate enough to have a dad in IT with an interest in games, so I remember going pretty sequentially from DOS to Win 3.11, to Win95, Win98 and onwards from the early 90s-to 2000s on the family computer. I made up my own system from hand-me-downs from whatever my dad didn't want when he upgraded bits.

The gaming evolution was much the same. Doom, Duke 3d, Terminal Velocity into Quake, Quake II, Half-Life, Homeworld, Unreal, etc. basically in order. I remember going from a Voodoo 2 to Geforce 3 to run UT2004, and then an ATI Radeon card so I could run CS: Source.

There are times I'd give anything for my old PC back with a partitioned hard drive and dual-boot into either XP sp3 or 98. Better days.

>>11960643
Supposedly, yes. They're still heavily working on it, though, and last I checked it's still not enabled by default, so we'll see if it's ready on time. They actually had set a date earlier in a month and even released a small teaser on their YouTube channel, but I guess they figured the VM manager wasn't ready for prime time once the date approached and so they changed the release date and made the teaser private.

>>11960904
Yeah, the manager not being completely ready is also why I think they delayed the 5.0 release
>last I checked it's still not enabled by default
Just tried the latest build from 15 mins ago and it's still not enabled by default

>>11960679
I recall some madlads got Doom 3 to run on SLI'd Voodoo 2s. Looked and ran like dog turds, but the fact they managed it was pretty cool. IIRC no card could even max it until like the fucking 8800GT or some shit.

>>11946656
oh how I loved game rips
internet used to be slow so being able to download game quickly was nice even if it lacked music or movies

>>11961598
That's how I first played MMX4, which in hindsight kinda sucks because it meant my first time through the game I didn't get to see the anime cutscenes or hear the music, so it kinda lessened the game's impact on me, to the point I don't remember it half as well as I do MMX6, which I actually ended up getting an actual copy of.

Are there any racing games worth checking out beyond the obvious picks? I've scratched the surface and enjoyed NFS and Screamer, but is there anything else from this era worth playing?

>>11962675
Holy shit are you me? I also played MMX4 for the first time without music
At least I played the Saturn version recently which is the best when it comes to audio (extended and proper-looping tracks)

Boy, I'm glad I have autism for old DOS and Windows shit, because I just went through hell trying to set up a jack-of-all-trades Windows 98 setup through 86Box.
>initially set it up with an AWE64 for compatibility with both DOS and Windows
>Windows installation was painless, DOS less so, had to look up a bunch of drivers and TSRs, then set them all up to make the card work more or less OK since it's a PnP card
>play around with it, realize FM synth sounds quiet
>go to mixer utility
>volume is all the way up, still quiet
>test with non-PnP AWE32, realize mixer utility gives me the option to increase volume gain
>now FM synth sounds good
>switch back to AWE64
>wtf gain settings are gone, FM synth is quiet again
>decide to ditch AWE64 and go for a dual card setup instead
>PCI SB128 for Windows, AWE32 for DOS
>go through a rigamarole of drivers, as some removed options, others slowed the system down, yet others sounded quiet, etc.
>finally settle on a good set, everything sounds good on Windows
>test out DOS
>turns out I installed DOS compatibility for the SB128, now it's conflicting with the AWE32
>have to go into autoexec and REM out the lines adding the SB128 DOS support, since undoubtedly it'll suck compared to the AWE32
>also have to REM out the lines needed to make PnP cards work to save a bit on memory
>finally, finally everything seems to work good, with good FM synth volume, EMU8000 support, MIDI, etc.
>my fucking face when
I realize I could've just set up DOSBox in like a tenth of the time, but my autism demands the ultimate all-in-one setup. But yeah, not recommended unless you like punishing yourself.

>>11965251
I installed windows 98 on an old p4 box and it just werked.

>>11965251
86box won't give you the ultimate anything since it won't ever support P3s

>>11965852
Well, ultimate as far as 86Box and my shitty old rig can take things, in any case.

>>11965251
>jack of all trades Win98/DOS machine
I understood the idea back in the late 90's, people trying to get the most bang for their buck, not wanting to lose their old DOS games on their new Win9x machine, etc. But creating another machine in 86box/PCem is free. Hell, I have a few different DOS emulated machines in 86box just because the machine I use for early-mid 90's DOS games doesn't play nicely with the early-mid 80's DOS games I've been digging into. I could go with an all-in-one system using cache-disable and cycle stealing programs to bring a Pentium 2 down to roughly 4.77MHz for when I want to play those games, but that's a shit-ton of effort when I can just roll up another system with a 4.77MHz CPU.

>>11966284
You're completely right. Again, this is purely my autism at work, more of a "let's see how far I can take this" thing.

Also, holy shit I don't know how it happened but at one point I went into DOS mode, and then when trying to exit back to Windows, it would just go into DOS mode again and never let me boot back into Windows no matter what I did. Turns out somehow the autoexec and config.sys lines I used for my custom "exit to MS-DOS" shortcut got written into the autoexec.bat and config.sys in the root of the C: drive, and so getting rid of them fixed the problem. Not sure how that happened, but I thought my system was a goner for a second there.

>>11965852
>it won't ever support P3s
For now
Maybe it will in a decade if CPUs are fast enough to low-level emulate a P3 at full speed
In any case most of the stuff that need a P3 can be played on modern machines without emulation in one way or another. Hell, Half-Life and Unreal came out before the P3 released, so you're getting in relatively "modern" territory with the P3 era with DirectX being pretty much standard in newer games at that point
86Box is more for the more obscure early Windows 9x era stuff or non-game/edutainment software

>>11960473

It's over for radiation-cels...

>>11965251
>I just went through hell trying to set up a jack-of-all-trades Windows 98 setup through 86Box

my brother you can't even build a jack-of-all-trades hardware for retro dos/windows. that's why retro nerds hoard so many computers.
you're better off making multiple configurations in 86Box for whatever you need.

>>11966627
Well, now that I got it done, sure, it won't play EVERYTHING, but most games between 1990 to 1997 are covered, which is still a pretty huge range.

>>11960904
They just enabled the manager by default 30 mins ago:
https://ci.86box.net/job/86Box/7567/

>>11966941
Sweet. Looks like the new release is just around the corner.

>>11967175
Yep, works perfectly

>>11967216
Fucking hell, about time, too.

Thoughts on LaunchBox for DOS? I like it because it allows me to not only set the game executable, but also the game's Setup executable for easily changing the game's configuration.