Anyone here still tinker with older games?

[Anonymous]

It just seems like, for most gamers, its a rush to the newest thing, including myself. Yet I find more satisfaction playing a lot of Pocket Fighter and Crash Team Racing on my PSOne w/LCD and MechWarrior 4 and Diablo II on the PC side.

Nostalgia, or just something different?

[Dave Long]

I'm always playing old stuff. I recently bought Metroid and Kirby's Adventure for NES and played those and some other NES favorites with my kids. Super Mario Bros., Tecmo Super Bowl and Solar Jetman ate a lot of my time. While waiting for Resident Evil on Gamecube, I went back and played RE: Code Veronica on Dreamcast.

I routinely play older stuff on the PC too. It really just depends how handy the CDs are (or if I've got the floppies around or an old game is installed) to determine what I play there.

Overall though, probably most of my "older" games I'm playing lately are on consoles. Vagrant Story, Chrono Cross and Front Mission 3 on PSOne... always lots of Dreamcast titles like Sonic Adventure, San Francisco Rush 2049, Mars Matrix, Bangai-O and lots of two or more player stuff too. With the kids, pretty much anything goes and my oldest latches onto different games at different times. Super Smash Bros. Melee is played a lot as is Super Monkey Ball.

I've been talking about Treasure a lot on these boards and with some friends so I went back and played Guardian Heroes on Saturn just this past week. What a phenomenal game that is... then while the Saturn was out I pulled out the gun and Virtua Cop 1 and 2 for some shooting fun. Both are great conversions from the arcade. I would have gone through my whole Saturn collection if I hadn't started playing Eternal Darkness which has me pretty much entranced so far. I also routinely buy old games at cut rate prices or used to make sure I've got them in my collection. PSOne titles are on my hitlist right now. So many that I've played through rentals that I want to make sure I own like Colony Wars Vengeance, Ape Escape, etc.

So you're not alone...

--Dave

[Sean Tudor]

I just recently reinstalled StarCraft and Diablo II:LOD. I am also reinstalling Janes USAF with the latest user-developed admin patch.

[Lee Johnson]

Janes USAF with the latest user-developed admin patch.
What's this patch for, exactly?

[Alternate#789]

I wouldn't really consider Diablo II and 'older' game, given that the game industry is by now, fairly old. Diablo II still seems like a flavor of the month to me, but maybe it's because my idiot friends still jabber about it constantly. If you ask me, just get an old computer (from an old office or something), and beef it up with other oldies (I found those in a school dumpster).

I have a RAMmed-out 386 in my basement I use for word processing, Infocom text adventures (as well as the newer interactive fiction stuff), and most importantly, X-Com. Wing Commander works well on it, but only in EGA mode. Quest for Glory has to be one of my favorite games of all time, despite the fact that all other Sierra adventures I've played suck. Good music, considering that it beeps out of the PC speaker. Old PCs, by the way, have far superior speakers (in my experience) than newer ones. Any old abandonware game that you can download but need Mo'slo to play probably works on it, so I play the older Ultimas until I can get an authentic Apple II. I'm pretty sure Ultima VII would break it, though.

I think I have more fun with this beast than my newer one, which by now has sickened me by the fact that it needs an upgrade, but I really don't feel like spending money on something so pointless.

[Anonymous]

On eBay, I've over time bought a bunch of highly-praised old DOS games I never got to play the first time around, so I could "catch up with the classics," and have been having a hell of an unpleasant time getting them to work. DOS sucks.

Some of the games which refuse to boot or install or whatever include the CD-ROM "talkie" versions of these games:

* Crusader: No Remorse (freezes during install)
* Betrayal at Krondor (battling with "not enough EMS" messages)
* Star Control & Star Control II (no audio, other issues)
* Alien Logic (won't run; EMS issues)
* Syndicate (no audio)
* Dragonsphere (won't run; EMS issues)
* Alone in the Dark 1-3 (won't run)
* The Scroll/Daughter of the Serpents (EMS issues; won't run)

Haven't tried the Tex Murphy game I bought yet.

I've tried creating DOS and Win 98 partitions to run these games, with no luck. I've tried various boot disk configurations. It's oh-so-fun to have 256MB and be told you don't have enough memory to run a game that would fit on a floppy disk.

Seems like a shame that the legacy of PC computer games is so difficult to access for the current generation. There are emulators out there for every other sort of computer under the sun; we need a DOS emulator that works for games. (Virtual PC isn't designed for that task, and Connectix refuses to go that route.)

Eh... crap. Maybe I need to re-sell these games.

[Anonymous]

I'd play my older PC games but XP won't lemme without some major tinkering. I'd love to run through Space Quest and Crusader again tho. I guess I need to find an old DOS box.

[Troy S Goodfellow]

We play a lot of older games at my place. I still run Win 95 on my primary machine, so DOS games run reasonably well.


Age of Rifles, Nethack, Colonization, Conquest of the New World...all on my machine at the moment. Some of them do require a little tinkering to work properly, though.

[Aleck]

I've tried creating DOS and Win 98 partitions to run these games, with no luck. I've tried various boot disk configurations. It's oh-so-fun to have 256MB and be told you don't have enough memory to run a game that would fit on a floppy disk.

The problem with these games isn't with your total amount of memory -- it's with the amount of memory that you have free in the first 640k (the "Conventional" memory, IIRC). I remember spending many, many hours fiddling with this stuff back in the day.

Here's what you want to do: make a small FAT partition with DOS 6.22 for running those old games. Use the partition to make a series of boot disks. These boot disks should load the essential memory managers, etc. into high memory and the like. Then you can nuke the partition and just use the boot disks.

Alternately, if you want to keep a bootable DOS 6.22 partition, do so and either use the memmaker utility in DOS 6.22 or find a copy of the old QEMM386 (was that the name of it?) which will do some crazy aggro stuff with loading programs into unused video shadow memory and the like.

The ultimate result is to have more than 610k or so of CONVENTIONAL memory available when you type "mem" at the dos prompt. If you get that much free, you should be able to play damn near anything (except for some Navy Seals game which, for the life of me, I never freed up enough memory to run, even with a boot disk!)

E-mail me directly if you need more help on this -- I'd be happy to try to throw together a bootdisk or two and e-mail 'em to ya.

[Gordon Cameron]

I used to retrogame a lot, though that was partly because my machine wasn't powerful enough to run newer games. I think I hit my nadir when I actually drove to a store to buy graph paper so I could map the dungeons in Questron, which I was playing on an
Apple ][ emulator. :shock:

Also, for an intense brainless gaming session, it's still hard to beat Demon Attack on an Atari 2600 emulator...

[Anonymous]

I just started a new game of Starcraft, after I work through the first campaigns ill let the Brood War Campaigns bloody my nose all over again.

[Bernie_Dy]

Good gameplay is timeless. Graphics help, of course, but there are still great games from the old days. Ben Sones mentioned Battle Bugs in his 'who am I' post, and I almost fell out of my chair. That is a great old game that I didn't think anyone played; an early RTS with a great theme.

The old games can be a problem to run on newer machines. I thought about buying an old 486 notebook just do run old games on them, but I'm not sure how many problems I'd still have since portables can be unreliable. I like that they upgraded X-Com in the collectors edition to run on the Windows platform...I wish a few more companies would do that with the classics.

[Sean Tudor]

Janes USAF with the latest user-developed admin patch.
What's this patch for, exactly?

Check this website here :
http://www.bobsyouruncle.net/mcflyhome.htm

There are two patches - the Admin 8.4 patch at 17 MB's. This is a large update of all the flight models and other functions in Janes USAF.

There is a second patch available - the Admin Super Pro patch at 440 MB's. It's basically a re-write of the entire Janes USAF game.

[Lee Johnson]

Thanks, Sean! :)

[AlexxKay]

I spent many months last year playing Sid Meier's Covert Action.

[Brian Rucker]

I've got an old P150 Win95 laptop packed with games. It's my version of a Gameboy. Civ II, X-COM: UFO Defense, Complete Carriers at War, Steel Panthers: World at War, GTA - London 1969, King of Dragon Pass, Eye of The Balor, Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV, Daggerfall, Darklands (Ultimate version), Command Aces of The Deep and Civil War Generals 2. For all the ones that have made it on the HD of Fame there are others that I couldn't get to run or didn't like enough. Most I bought at various sites online or on Ebay though a few were found in stores with good back catalogues. Eye of The Balor is the only one I liberated from an abandonware site as it's impossible to find.

I've also kept my P350 Win98 (Voodoo2) machine for my flight sims as my HOTAS setup doesn't work with USB or XP very well. Certain other non-XP compliant games run fine on it as well.

I probably play as many classic games in a week as I do new ones unless I'm particularly obsessed with a title.

My Dreamcast hasn't seen action in a while but I play some older PSOne titles on the PS2 including Front Mission 3 (it was new to me at the time) and Romance of The Three Kingdoms VI.

Since I've mentioned RoTK twice I'll go a third time and point out, to any fans, that RoTK VII is out for the PS2. If you hate RoTK don't play it. If you are a fan of the series or curious, this is my favorite one yet with some good roleplaying elements (you can play any character, not just a ruler). I've already spammed other forums with my overflowing love of this title and I'm pretty proud of myself that I haven't sullied Quarter to Three yet. Whoops. :roll:

[Tyjenks]

A friend of mine and I used to get together, drink beers, and play Ramparts on the SNES. Now we both have kids and we were too loud and cursed too much to do that as often.

Surrounding your guns with a bunch of Tetris like pieces and then blowing each other to bits and then start all over again.

Mmmm.Mmmmm. Pure gameplay goodness. :D

[dwinn]

Lately I've been scouring the 9.99 racks for jewel-case games from the last 5 years or so. There's a certain perverse joy in buying games like Jedi Knight, Might and Magic 6, and Homeworld for one fifth their original cost. They run like a charm on a (nowadays) average machine, too.

[Anonymous]

Front Mission 3 IS awesome. I have been checking the bargin bin for PSOne, PC, and Dreamcast titles. I mostly pick up PSOne titles since I feel my Dreamcast collection is complete. Here's a run-down list:

http://users.techline.com/thomps23/games.txt

Hey Tyjenks, did you ever play Rock n Roll Racing. Awesome racing title with very well done music.

[Anonymous]

Oh, and notice Tech Romancer under the Dreamcast list on the link above? Best robot fighter ever. Forget about Cyberbots. Tech Romancer also has the best story mode in a fighting game ever. Oh yes it rocks. Its a fun game too, it's still on sale at www.capcom.com I think. Check it out if you want.

[antlers]

You can get almost any old DOS game to run in bochs (http://bochs.sourceforge.net), an open source PC emulator. It's great if you don't have an actual old PC lying around.

It's an emulator, so it lets you run PC games on any platform that will run bochs, including Linux, Solaris, and Mac OS X.

bochs emulates right down to the hardware, so if it could run on a PC with a Soundblaster card, it can probably run in bochs. It won't run that quick though; bochs on my Athlon 2000+ is about the equivalent of a 386-40. Still, that's plenty for the classic DOS games that appeared before Win 95.

It let me play Ultima VII: Serpent Isle, which is a very tricky game to get running on any sort of modern hardware, in a window on my PC. I'm going to try it with Ultima: Underworld.

[Bernie_Dy]

Great link. Thanks, antlers!

[Jason McCullough]

On eBay, I've over time bought a bunch of highly-praised old DOS games I never got to play the first time around, so I could "catch up with the classics," and have been having a hell of an unpleasant time getting them to work. DOS sucks.

Some of the games which refuse to boot or install or whatever include the CD-ROM "talkie" versions of these games:

* Crusader: No Remorse (freezes during install)
* Betrayal at Krondor (battling with "not enough EMS" messages)
* Star Control & Star Control II (no audio, other issues)
* Alien Logic (won't run; EMS issues)
* Syndicate (no audio)
* Dragonsphere (won't run; EMS issues)
* Alone in the Dark 1-3 (won't run)
* The Scroll/Daughter of the Serpents (EMS issues; won't run)

Haven't tried the Tex Murphy game I bought yet.

I've tried creating DOS and Win 98 partitions to run these games, with no luck. I've tried various boot disk configurations. It's oh-so-fun to have 256MB and be told you don't have enough memory to run a game that would fit on a floppy disk.

Seems like a shame that the legacy of PC computer games is so difficult to access for the current generation. There are emulators out there for every other sort of computer under the sun; we need a DOS emulator that works for games. (Virtual PC isn't designed for that task, and Connectix refuses to go that route.)

Eh... crap. Maybe I need to re-sell these games.

Did you ever play Crusader: No Regret? It's much, much better than No Remorse. Still one of my favorite games.

[Anonymous]

Both Regret and Remorse rock. Is there any chance of new titles in the series being made? I remember rumors of a Crusader movie too.

[Alan Au]

If I hadn't lost my DOS games set up with my last OS reinstall, I'd be able to provide more specifics, but the key for me was learning to configure emm386.exe properly. I seem to remember the "nobackfill" option was particularly relevant. Anyhow, good luck getting stuff to run, and if I can unearth any more details from the depths of my system, I'll try and see that they find a way onto the boards. :)

- Alan

[Kahlil Gibran]

I've got Starlords, MOO, MOO II and MOM installed and I have marathon play sessions every once in awhile. Lately i've been playing Baldur's Gate II (My wife bought it for me a very long time ago and I never had the time to really get into it until now) I'm so far behind that it is pathetic.. Oh, i've been playing WWF No Mercy (N64) every day since it was released. I know, I need some therapy...

[Anonymous]

Sometimes it's good to be behind.

[Xaroc]

Another site people might want to check out is www.bootdisk.com. They have a number of premade bootdisks from various DOS and other OS versions that might help free up the memory you need. I use the DrDOS bootdisk they have for flashing my bios and it works great.

-- Xaroc

[Desslock]

I'd love to be able to conveniently play Crusader No Regret. Any easy way to do so with current systems and modern operating systems? I'm thinking of setting up an old P2 300 system I have as a DOS system, to play those old games.

[Jason McCullough]

No Regret doesn't have any speed issues. Just create a tiny dos partition.

[Desslock]

>No Regret doesn't have any speed issues. Just create a tiny dos partition.

Yeah, I just find partitioning a drag, probably because I don't really know what I'm doing. I'm liking my DOS oldie machine idea though

[mtkafka]

One old game on my pc now that I've sorta been playing is Legends of Valor... which was kind of an early elder scrolls game in sprit at least. Sid Meiers Pirates I still play once in awhile. Same with Arena, Daggerfall, MM Worlds of Xeen, JA, JA:DG, Wizardry 5-7, tons of Roguelikes and other crpg's of yore... also some Build Engine games for more recent oldies, like Duke Nukem 3d and Blood I fire up once in awhile....and the oldie but goodie rts that is the best ever....TA.

etc

[Jason McCullough]

>No Regret doesn't have any speed issues. Just create a tiny dos partition.

Yeah, I just find partitioning a drag, probably because I don't really know what I'm doing. I'm liking my DOS oldie machine idea though

A really, really easy way to do it:

1. Buy a elcheapo 10 gig drive, slap it in the machine as a secondary.
2. Make a dos boot disk.
3. Boot off the disk, use fdisk to create a partition on the new drive, format it, and then play away.

[Lee Johnson]

Ummm... will DOS 6.22 even know what to do with a 10 GB drive?

[Matthew Gallant]

No, but with fdisk you can create a partition that DOS can use and use the rest for whatever.

[Desslock]

Thanks guys. What's the largest DOS HD size, 2 GB? Although I guess there's almost no point, given the size of the files, in having anything more than a quarter of that.

[Jim F.]

I still, about once every 6 months, load up Chaos Overlords and MOOII and live in the past for a couple of weeks. Homeworld: Cataclysm also has a permanent spot reserved on my hard drive.

Pharoah gets loaded up when I'm in the mood for a slower paced game after playing todays hectic clickfests.

Last week I picked up the AD&D Classics pack by EA, being as I'm filled with warm thoughts of my ancient AD&D CRPG days (thanks to NWN). The games, unfortuantly, just don't stand up to the test of time. I think I'm just too spoiled with today's graphics and gameplay to go back to the old days of Secret of the Silver Blades, Curse of the Azure Bonds, and Pool of Radiance.

[Kross]

1. Buy a elcheapo 10 gig drive, slap it in the machine as a secondary.
2. Make a dos boot disk.
3. Boot off the disk, use fdisk to create a partition on the new drive, format it, and then play away.

I have a new system with an audigy and geforce 4 4600 (there is joy in mudville), and I haven't yet tried to play old games, but I'm predicting problems, and this sounds like a good idea. How do you make a dos boot disk? Do I have to get different drivers for the cards than the drivers I'm using now for XP?

[bgumm]

just played the original Grand Theft Auto last night. i fire up NHL 93 on the Genesis every once in a while w/ my buddy for some HOCKEY ACTION ON SEGA!!! (roenick scores)

[Anonymous]

I have a new system with an audigy and geforce 4 4600 (there is joy in mudville), and I haven't yet tried to play old games, but I'm predicting problems, and this sounds like a good idea. How do you make a dos boot disk? Do I have to get different drivers for the cards than the drivers I'm using now for XP?

You're likely to encounter serious driver problems, actually. I don't know how an audigy will perform -- anyone know if classic soundblaster drivers work with it okay? The video card shouldn't be too much trouble, provided the games aren't 3D accelerated (and very few DOS games were -- and those that were only support 3dfx cards anyway, so... )

As for making a DOS bootdisk, go to http://www.bootdisk.com and download one of the DOS 6.22 bootdisks they have there.

Stefan, I think DOS supports up to 2 GB. As for making partitions, if you have a copy of Partition Magic, it's easy as can be. Otherwise, go the second hard disk route with a bootdisk -- it'll save you plenty of grief.

[Jason McCullough]

There used to be dos-compatible SB Live/Audigy drivers on the Creative Labs website, but they're gone now. Try google, I guess; you may need to use the Live drivers.

[voltaic]

This led me to the answers to play Sam-n-Max under Windows 98, with an Audigy Platinum.

http://www.americas.creative.com/support/kbase/article.asp?ID=894&Centric=207

[bgumm]

for my money, it doesn't get any better than old LucasArts graphic adventure games. zak mccrack kicks all forms of ass.