Computers XP/WIN95/DOS Backwards Compatability

Thanks to Bill Gate's glorious brain fart DOS officially died with the advent of Windows XP. With it went a large array of classic PC games (Sam and Max Hit the Road, Day of the Tentacle, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Wolfenstein 3D, Terminal Velocity...). Nearly all of those classic DOS PC games have problems running on XP, if they even run at all. Many, many Windows 95 and pre-95 era games are a crapshoot as well. Either they run fine or they simply tank and fling you back to the desktop in shame.

VDM used to have a website where you could download thier soundmanager program that helped to fix Audio problems when playing classic DOS games in XP, but did nothing to help with any of the other issues. I haven't been able to play my Alien's Vs Predator Gold Edition (scariest game ever) since I switched to XP.

Are there any programs or program packs that you guys have stumbled upon that allow us XP losers to play our classic games in XP? I miss my AvP and Classic Lucas Arts Game (X-Wing still kicks ass!) I've been snooping around but have been ending up empty handed. I don't have the programming knowhow to troubleshoot the errors I get in XP or to find/create the programming fix that solves it.

I would give someone my first born son if they knew/found the great, golden answer to this delema, but I already promised it to Neph a while back. We've yet to name it.

Thankee

~W

 

http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/

DOSbox ought to solve your old-school gaming woes.

I found I never bothered to use it myself, though. Installed and everything, then I never played any of the games I wanted to play.

 

Fascinating.

Now what about getting win 3.11 and win 95 games to run on the NT/XP shell?

~W

 

Hrm. I think they can be configured if you go to propities of the .exe file and change it's "interface" to run within NT.

- Teddz

 

You're talking about right clicking the exe and setting it's compatability to Win95. That method is also a crapshoot. Sometimes it seems to do the trick, sometimes not. I was looking for a more reliable interface or something. I was hoping that somewhere someone was pissed off enough to generate a fix.

~W

 

AFAIK that's probably the only way to play 95-based exe-files on XP interfaces. You could, however, download XP-patches for the various programs. I know that Rollercoaster Tycoon had a XP patch for it to run smoothly...