The bigger my collection gets, the more older windows (and DOS) games I acquire.. For most of them they can run fine under Windows 10 but some, namely ones from the 95 to XP era don't work 100% DOSBox and Zdoom ect seem to help their retrospective titles but I can't seem to find a way to play the other ones like Alien Vs Predator or even quake. I've tried a virtual machine in the past but that just didn't work, mainly GPU and sound issues. I also did have a Pentium 4 PC I built for the purpose but it was a pain to use and didn't have dedicated GPU.. I'm thinking of maybe dual booting XP and 10? How well does XP do with 9x games? Any other methods besides a dual OS environment? My current PC specs (If this is still compatible with XP or 98SE): CPU: Intel i7 860 Mobo: Asus P7P55 LX GPU: Nvidia GTX 670 (2gb) Ram: 8 GB DDR3 My HDD's are all NTFS, IIRC windows 98 doesn't like NTFS? Also, how well does older OS's work on external USB (I won't be moving the install to a different PC)
I use D-fend reloaded and dosbox for pre 95 games (Lucas arts etc) and virtual box for those iffy 95 - pre xp titles. Maybe run a dedicated second HDD (Fat32) with win98 on it.
Get a bigger place. In all seriousness, DOSBox is probably the best method here. If you need an old GPU, they're very easy to find at PC recycle places.
Winquake.exe worked for me in Windows 10, couldn't get glquake.exe to work though. To retire my old XP gaming box, I made it a VM and play it in Windows 10 now and discarded the old hardware. (VMware converter on XP to create an image, VMPlayer 7 on Windows 10 to play the image you created)
DOSBox is excellent but not perfect. Personally, I've run into enough bugs to justify (re-)buying and old 486 box (then again I seem to have a knack to pick those titles that hit all the weird corner cases somehow... 99.9% of users should be just fine with it) As for earlier Windows games (at least the 3D-accelerated 9x ones), I'll have to recommend to go with hardware. Kinda weird platform design choices (from today's point of view), combined with the graphics hardware interfaces of that time being in a constant flux make for a positively non-fun emulation experience. Non-accelerated titles will probably run fine in a VM, and later ones (W2K and up) I almost always got to run natively so far (up to 7 at least, didn't do all much on 8.1 yet and haven't touched 10 so far), though sometimes you have know a few dirty tricks (like for example Shattered Union, which needs Windows booted in a special way to disable all memory above 2GB). It's doable, most of the time, but you'll have to decide for yourself if it's worth your time compared toe.g. just grabbing an el-cheapo turn-of-the-millenum pc (or maybe a laptop to save some space).
Retro PC is the only way to go if you want to cover everything, but you're opening yourself up to a lot of other issues and tinkering. I'd say if DOSBox/VMs and GOG releases don't cover the games you want to play, you can't really do much at the moment, other than going the hardware route. PCEm is a very promising project and has produced amazing results in just a few years, but it still has ways to go.
There's good Quake engine ports out there, you can play the first 3 Quake games on anything really. Also GoG have Alien vs Predator and it works perfectly on modern hardware.. I would just get an older laptop though, doesn't take up much space, costs basically nothing and you can install what you want. Some of the older Lifebooks and Porteges are very small and slim (in some cases netbook sized), I had a Lifebook B series and it was good for old games once you get over installing the OS as it had no optical drive. A Toshiba R100 is a nice laptop for older games.
Have you tried Windows XP mode? http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/windows7/install-and-use-windows-xp-mode-in-windows-7
I can attest to this. I've got a wicked windows 98 gaming computer and it took me a good 10 some hours just to get a joystick and one game to work. Had to dig out a old version of Joytokey. Go through the pits of heck and back to update Directx to version 8.1 (May god have mercy on your soul if you have no way to connect your old computer to do this.) Had to find old drivers as well.
Not that hard IMO. The games themselves have their DirectX versions, remember? Other drivers should be stock and be ok. Updates are needed if some issues are known. It really can take some time to set up. But it's worth it IMO. The laptop is a good idea for those without space. The "worst" part should be only the screen resolution, as always. But even today is possible to have this kind of issue.
I'm working on building a Windows 98 gaming machine. I already have most of the parts. When it's finished it'll be something like this: ASUS motherboard (I forget the model) Pentium III 800Mhz 512MB (maybe 1GB) PC100 RAM Voodoo 3 3000 Sound Blaster 128 The main purpose of building this machine is so I can run late 90s (and earlier) PC games, specifically ones that use Glide. This is going to be based on a machine that I had as a kid, but with the specs listed above it will be more powerful - and it should be overkill for most of the games I want to play. Once this machine is finished, I can also use it for other video cards or other PCI or AGP cards. Eventually I'd like to get an Intel740 and/or a PowerVR card. I think I could also use this for DOS games.
I have two older PC's I built just for this purpose. One with Win98, other XP. If one can't load something, the other usually can. Win98 is pretty solid for compatability needs.
I have two older PC's I built just for this purpose. One with Win98, other XP. If one can't load something, the other usually can. Win98 is pretty solid for compatability needs.
