DOS Games Discussion

I just bought a new PC from the local Goodwill for 10 cents. It is a Compaq Presario SR1230NX with the wifi and modem cards ripped out. Its got 1gb of ram, two 80Gb harddrives in raid, (I don't think that is how it comes stock though!) an AMD Athlon XP 3200+ at 2.2Ghz, and Via S3G IGP chipset graphics. Its currently running Lubuntu, the previos owner must have had plenty of technical knowledge! And to give it away at a thrift store?!?

Wow, 10 cents? Any working computer a steal at that price!

What do you want to do with it, more specifically? Any particular games, or just exploring?
That's plenty powerful to run modern Windows/linux and Dosbox. That's the easy way. Nice box to explore and learn Linux on, too.

It should certainly run Dos 6.22 for some games, but depending on what you want to run you'll likely have some trouble with computer speed for older games (80s and early 90s) and sound and maybe mouse drivers on newer dos games (later 90s). But the motherboard compatibility layer might be OK for some of that.

Dos doesn't know memory more than 1 Meg + extras. Dos doesn't know USB. Dos doesn't know large hard drives. (depends on version what "large" means, dos 6.22 or 7 can handle 2GB partitions, I think.) Dos definitely doesn't know raid without special dos drivers and dos supported raid card! But the Motherboard should make that transparent.

However, certainly no harm trying! Does it have a CD drive Floppy drives? Those are the usual ways to get data onto a dos computer since it doesn't understand USB.

Or you can try a dual booting setup (I can't help you too much there, but there should be guides online) with windows or linux to do the dos data transfers.

"Real dos gaming computers" tend to have specs from the 90s like "Pentium 90 / 133, 4 megabytes memory, 100MB hard drive", or from the 80s like XT, 286, 386 for older stuff...

You can run DOS on just about anything. With or without a hard drive. I like DOS 5.0 and can just boot it up from my floppy A:\ drive. I then just swap my floppy out for what ever game I want to play. Some games require a hard drive install.

1.) If your mobo supports SMART for your hard drive, you'll have to turn that off. SMART will keep telling you that your hard drive is failing due to the Fat16 file system.

2.) Some games that were meant for a 286, 386, or 486 may run to fast, like Wing Commander. There is an app called Mo'Slo that can virtually slow down your processor. SIERRA games seem to run fine here.

3.) Only allocate 2GB for the hard drive, on the first partition if you have multiple partitions.

4.) The CuteMouse driver works fine for your mouse. There's also a 3rd party cdrom driver that I can not remember the name of. Just google it.
http://cutemouse.sourceforge.net/

5.) Yamaha YMF724 sound card works great with OPL3 and Sound Blaster compatibility. I have one of these and its the best sound card for PCI slots while supporting DOS. Drivers are easily found on the net too.

That's just the basics but should get you started.

Chilly Willy wrote:5.) Yamaha YMF724 sound card works great with OPL3 and Sound Blaster compatibility. I have one of these and its the best sound card for PCI slots while supporting DOS. Drivers are easily found on the net too.

Sweet, that's a good thing to know. Thanks for the info!

No problem!

Driver link...
http://www.yamaha.co.jp/english/product/lsi/download/

USB driver exists too.

Thou need a Beeper from an very old comp. Otherwise nothin's heard from in. example Duke 1.

Chilly Willy wrote:1.) If your mobo supports SMART for your hard drive, you'll have to turn that off. SMART will keep telling you that your hard drive is failing due to the Fat16 file system.

That's news to me. Do you have any source / explanation to this? SMART, as far as I know, is agnostic to the file system.

2.) Some games that were meant for a 286, 386, or 486 may run to fast, like Wing Commander. There is an app called Mo'Slo that can virtually slow down your processor. SIERRA games seem to run fine here.

Chilly Willy wrote:3.) Only allocate 2GB for the hard drive, on the first partition if you have multiple partitions.

Win98 SE ("MS-DOS 7.10") as well as some modern FreeDOS/DR-DOS versions will work fine with FAT32 partitions of any size. Some specific DOS apps may have issues, although most games should be fine.

Chilly Willy wrote:4.) The CuteMouse driver works fine for your mouse. There's also a 3rd party cdrom driver that I can not remember the name of. Just google it.

I love CuteMouse. For CD-ROM drivers I use VIDE-CDD.SYS, sometimes with SHSUCDX instead of MSCDEX.

@dr_st

SMART gives me a false error report here on my pc with DOS installed. So I disable it.

As for 2GB. This is for older Microsoft DOS only installs. Windows 98 deals with this in its own way. I don't use FreeDOS or anything other than Microsoft.