Putting together a Dos Box

[Cirrus]

Not the emulator... I want to put together the ultimate DOS gaming machine. Dosbox, the emulator, isn't perfect, and it frankly doesn't run enough of the games I want it to.

Just recently, I was plodding around on House of the Underdogs and I found a neat game called Captain Blood. After reading about how to play for about an hour, I went to play it and found it was totally unsupported on Dosbox. Blech.

I would like some good suggestions on how to put together an end-all Dos machine.

I suppose I wouldn't need the fastest processor, just a good old windows 3.11 machine with maybe 64 megs of Ram, MAYBE a pentium 2, and a copy of DOS.

I suppose I really could get a windows 98 machine. It just bums me out that I can't play so many of the best games that are available. Damn Windows XP.

Question: Can you run DOS on XP? If I were to get disks and figure out a way to install it? That would be a pretty slick "emulator", right?

[Jibbajaba]

I built a DOS box a few years ago and it works great. dont go overboard on the processor, there's no need. I have a 486 DX4-100 with 32 megs of RAM, a 1gig HD and an AWE64 sound card. Im not too happy with the soundcard, but i couldnt find an SBpro locally. I had an Ultrasound (which is the best IMHO) but it got fried somehow. Just remember that you want hardware thats compatible with all of those old games, so get old stuff whenever possible. My AWE64 isnt totally compatible with some things so it sounds wierd.

Chris

[pacmanhat]

Here's a rule of thumb for you:

The more Windows has evolved, the more of DOS that has been phased out. So, the older the OS the better. XP can technically run it, but with limited capabilites in terms of the commands it can understand (to the point that it's practically useless).

Hey, whatdya know...my Operating Systems class DOES have a purpose...

[Moon Patrol]

I think windows 95 would probably be your BEST o/s from the DOS age, and as far as processing speed goes, something about a p2 200 - 300 mhz with somewhere around 64-128 megs of ram should run just about everything from the good ol' days of dos. It has been my experience that windows XP cannot run quite a few older games, simply because of the different ways that the kernel has been implemented. I would NOT suggest using win 3.11, that's minimal on a system, but it is just lackluster, and there's always the 1 or 2 games that want windows 95 instead. To this day I still run a pentium 2 350 mhz machine as my main machine, it gets everything done I want it to, and it runs windows xp (barely).

[InsaneDavid]

I think windows 95 would probably be your BEST o/s from the DOS age, and as far as processing speed goes, something about a p2 200 - 300 mhz with somewhere around 64-128 megs of ram should run just about everything from the good ol' days of dos. It has been my experience that windows XP cannot run quite a few older games, simply because of the different ways that the kernel has been implemented. I would NOT suggest using win 3.11, that's minimal on a system, but it is just lackluster, and there's always the 1 or 2 games that want windows 95 instead. To this day I still run a pentium 2 350 mhz machine as my main machine, it gets everything done I want it to, and it runs windows xp (barely).

Naa, if you are going to have Windows on there go for Win98SE since you will get the most functionality from both sides. You still have a true DOS mode yet you get network support and can support USB2.0. If you want to go the route of a DOS only machine go for a later release of MSDOS, probably at least 6.0. However if you use Win98SE as the backbone you'll find setting things up and addressing problems a lot easier than going straight DOS. Remember that Windows 3.1 was really just a program running off DOS.

[unbroken]

go down to your local thrift store and pick up one of those crappy p2 pac bells for like 30$, do a fresh install with windows 95 and have fun playing any dos game you want!

[Yago]

You can always setup a dual boot. XP on one side and DOS on the other. That way you won't have to have a dedicated machine. This is what I ended up doing so I could play Dark Forces again.

[syd]

DOS is great, but it's a pain in the ass. I found that the newer the operating system, the more chances that games in DOS will run out of memory. DOS has a few different kinds of memory (i.e. extended memory) that it likes to run out of. Thats the great thing about dosbox.

However if it doesn't work in dosbox then I'd go with a pentium 2 200-300 with win98se on it if you want to play "newer" dos games like duke3d. If you want to play the older dos stuff then a 486 with only dos on it should be good enough.

[YoshiM]

DOS is great, but it's a pain in the ass. I found that the newer the operating system, the more chances that games in DOS will run out of memory. DOS has a few different kinds of memory (i.e. extended memory) that it likes to run out of. Thats the great thing about dosbox.

If you're running pure DOS (ie no Win 9X) and don't have a buttload of TSR's programs at bootup you shouldn't be running out of memory. MEMMAKER usually does a great job of setting up your computer's memory and there are freeware memory managers out there that do an even better job.

If this machine is going to be just for DOS, I wouldn't muck about with Windows 9x. For everything Windows related you could probably get away with using Compatibility mode in Windows XP on your main machine. It's rare that an old Windows program doesn't work in XP for me.

As for the machine itself: that depends on you. If you want to focus on early 1990's (cutting off point about say 1994) a fast 486 (DX4 100 MHz) with a minimum of 8 MB of RAM should do the trick. There are some titles, not many, that don't like Pentium processors so this will guarantee you the most compatibility along with decent speed for the newer games. Machines of this vintage typically have VESA compatible video cards so that shouldn't be an issue.

For a sound card you want something that was from the time period as more modern ones don't handle DOS all that well. Of course, classic Soundblaster (regular, Pro, AWE) is always choice. In my experience non-name brand cards (like the all-in-one monsters from Packard Bell, for example) work pretty well too. Just make sure you can get your hands on the original drivers.

Personally I use an Acer Pentium I 100 MHz machine (as I couldn't find a good 486 PC, but oh well) with the Acer sound card (running in Sound Blaster Mode-works great), DOS 6.5 and a CD Burner that I can actually burn to in DOS (great for backups, only spare CD drive I had was my old burner). Only game I have problems with is The Elder Scrolls: Arena because of the freeware memory manager I'm using so I gotta toss together a boot disk.

[vulcanjedi]

Wow

Finally something I can talk about :)

If you want to play games from 93 and earlier your best bet is to stay way from the pentiums and get something without the PCI bus. The biggest incompatibility issues with graphics are too much speed and are PCI related.

Captain Blood is an excellent game. I have it on a Thinkpad 360c. It's a 486 dx-50 with 16mb. I have a half dozen 340 mb drives for it. I have tons of non CD games loaded on this system.

My favorite old system is one I built last year. It is a tiny little AMD 386 board. I was actually shocked by the manufacture and bios dates which show Feb 1995! It has an AMD 386-40 and a fasmath co processor and 16mb ram. I have an adaptec 1542f SCSI with floppy interface. That is connected to a 2 gig hd and a quad speed CD. It runs dos 6.2 and windows 3.11 for workgroups. I have a serial card in it for the mouse and an AWE soundblaster card. And a kraft joystick interface card. And some diamond 256k VGA card.

One other working old system I keep is a 386 unit with onboard graphics an serial and printer ports. 8 mb and only speake sound. I have a PC comms card in this that connects to the 4 in 1 card in my Sega Saturn.

I still have plenty of parts for old systems :)

Can't get enough..

VJ

[Vigilante]

I'd agree with everyone else here, if your looking to play DOS based games then just get another pc for it. I just got a pentium 3 450 I converted over the weekend with DOS games. It will become a duel boot DOS/Win98. Of course the thing is too fast, but I can tweak that out later. 486's would work fine, but IMO a pentium 133 is prime for that sort of thing.

[Moon Patrol]

I'd agree with everyone else here, if your looking to play DOS based games then just get another pc for it. I just got a pentium 3 450 I converted over the weekend with DOS games. It will become a duel boot DOS/Win98. Of course the thing is too fast, but I can tweak that out later. 486's would work fine, but IMO a pentium 133 is prime for that sort of thing.

Yea, I forgot to address that thing about the computer actually being too fast to run some programs. You can use things like Mo' Slo and other programs that will slow your computer down to where it can actually be used to play those old games, I think HOTU has a couple you can download, and any internet search should give you some pretty good leads. Just never BUY any of that crap if they want you to buy/register, because most of the time, someone already has a better program out there for free.

[NE146]

Question: Can you run DOS on XP? If I were to get disks and figure out a way to install it? That would be a pretty slick "emulator", right?

Yes! if you got a good machine.. forget dosbox. Put on virtual pc (or similar programs that are out there) on there..

Then you can put whatever the heck you want on it :P Heck, put on windows 3.11 if ya want.

[The_EniGma]

Why not use Win 3.11? Its pratically DOS with a GUI. I used to use it as my first box to learn about computers and stuff. Also it has a GUI which makes it easier for launching all your games, no more fidling around with this and that command this and that dir tree just pick your thing and launch it.

Good luck!