Old Dos games don't run well on Win XP

[Mark42]

I just pulled out my old copies of Doom, Doom2 and Wolfenstein to install for the kids (ummm, that would be me). Never played them on a Win XP machine before, and they don't play so smooth, and sound is messed up. I set the Compatability to be Win 95, but it still doesn't help. I'm sure it has something to do with the sound card selection wanting to know what IRQ is to be used, etc.

How do get Win XP Pro (service pack 3) to run these old games properly?

Thanks!

Mark

 

[captquest]

Re: Old Dos games don't run well on Win XP

I could explain it myself but, here ya go bro

http://www.dosgames.com/xphints.php

BTW why not treat yourself ... I mean the kids to some new games they you whatever might get addicted.

 

[ebry710]

Re: Old Dos games don't run well on Win XP

I just pulled out my old copies of Doom, Doom2 and Wolfenstein to install for the kids (ummm, that would be me). Never played them on a Win XP machine before, and they don't play so smooth, and sound is messed up. I set the Compatability to be Win 95, but it still doesn't help. I'm sure it has something to do with the sound card selection wanting to know what IRQ is to be used, etc.
Mark

XP was redesigned. Unlike Windows 95, XP does not use msdos as the base. Old games use to drop to msdos to play. I don't know service pack 3 will make a difference.

 

[Mark42]

Re: Old Dos games don't run well on Win XP

I could explain it myself but, here ya go bro

http://www.dosgames.com/xphints.php

BTW why not treat yourself ... I mean the kids to some new games they you whatever might get addicted.

We have two different game boxes, and I wanted to show the kids something different. They get tired of the same old stuff. They haven't seen the first generation of PC based video games from the 90's. So it's all new to them, and I was surprised how much fun they still are.

They work great without sound. I'm going to install DOSBOX and see if that will get the full game sound working right.

 

[SnappingTurtle]

Re: Old Dos games don't run well on Win XP

I tried that using a DOS emulator program several years ago on a older PC I had setting around.

It work pretty good, the only thing is that everything processed so fast on the newer, old machine, you could hardly see what was happening, much less play games. :redface:

I finally gave up.

I lot of these old games are being re-released now for the newer OS's.

 

[Mark42]

Re: Old Dos games don't run well on Win XP

I downloaded and installed DOSBOX. It works great! the games run at the right speed, the sound is fantastic, and you can fine tune the processing of the game by adjusting frame rate and CPU utilization up or down. The Doom game works smooth and the sound is better on these new machines than they ever were on the old Dos machines.

If you have kids who are board with the choices on the game boxes, download DOSBOX and fire up some of those early 3d shooter games. They will be amazed at what was available in 1994.