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Posted by Stealth
on Saturday May 17, 2008 @ 02:02am |
Posted by voltaic
on Saturday May 17, 2008 @ 07:30am >> [ reply ][ rating +0 ] You will both want and need a dinosaur to play many old school games. Get a Pentium 100 or so, 16 megs of RAM, SB16 sound card, 4Mb video card, <4Gb hard drive, DOS 6.2 and Windows 98SE. Well, this is by far the least painful (and cheapest) thing I've done for a broad. ha ha ha... it only goes down hill from here... -stealth |
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Posted by tele
on Sunday May 25, 2008 @ 10:26pm >> [ reply ][ rating +0 ] You will both want and need a dinosaur to play many old school games. Get a Pentium 100 or so, 16 megs of RAM, SB16 sound card, 4Mb video card, <4Gb hard drive, DOS 6.2 and Windows 98SE. I agree, but i'd go with like 64 megs of ram. If you want to play something like strike commander you'd need more than 16. And it's still old school, and bad ass by the way! |
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Posted by voltaic
on Monday May 26, 2008 @ 01:32pm >> [ reply ][ rating +0 ] I agree, but i'd go with like 64 megs of ram. If you want to play something like strike commander you'd need more than 16. And it's still old school, and bad ass by the way! I thought about that before choosing 16Mb. You're right that there are games that work better with more. My concern/question is weren't there alot of games that wouldn't work if you had too much? Maybe the best idea is to have four 16Mb RAM chips, then you can go 16 or 32 or 64 if you need to swap them out. Alternately, I might be having a false memory about how DOS and games viewed RAM. Well, this is by far the least painful (and cheapest) thing I've done for a broad. ha ha ha... it only goes down hill from here... -stealth |
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Posted by Krux
on Monday May 26, 2008 @ 10:40pm >> [ reply ][ rating +0 ] I agree, but i'd go with like 64 megs of ram. If you want to play something like strike commander you'd need more than 16. And it's still old school, and bad ass by the way! I thought about that before choosing 16Mb. You're right that there are games that work better with more. My concern/question is weren't there alot of games that wouldn't work if you had too much? Maybe the best idea is to have four 16Mb RAM chips, then you can go 16 or 32 or 64 if you need to swap them out. Alternately, I might be having a false memory about how DOS and games viewed RAM. It generally doesn't hurt to have more RAM than you need. CPU speed is still going to your limiting factor. "Online petitions totally effect social change." -- voltaic |
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Posted by voltaic
on Tuesday May 27, 2008 @ 10:34am >> [ reply ][ rating +0 ] No, there were many older games that would do things like check how much RAM you had and, if not enough, refuse to run. The problem is that with some of these, if the RAM count got too high (say, over 32 Mb), it would go to negative numbers because of long integer LOLs and then the game would naturally refuse to run thinking you had -4Gb of RAM or some such. Thus, too much RAM was a problem for some older games. But like tele pointed out, there were a few that actually used more than 16Mb, so I changed my position to having four 16Mb sticks in there unless/until you run one of the dumb-ass overRAM games, then just take out a pair or three if needed. CPU speed is trivial to throttle back in DOS, using a tool like SloMo. This is why I'd recommend a mid-range Pentium 1; and if you have one of those games that ran in super-fast mode because it was written on 386s and they didn't hook the system clock to gauge speed, just load SloMo in memory and you're good to go. Well, this is by far the least painful (and cheapest) thing I've done for a broad. ha ha ha... it only goes down hill from here... -stealth |
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Posted by Krux
on Tuesday May 27, 2008 @ 07:42pm >> [ reply ][ rating +1 ] No, there were many older games that would do things like check how much RAM you had and, if not enough, refuse to run. The problem is that with some of these, if the RAM count got too high (say, over 32 Mb), it would go to negative numbers because of long integer LOLs and then the game would naturally refuse to run thinking you had -4Gb of RAM or some such. Thus, too much RAM was a problem for some older games. But like tele pointed out, there were a few that actually used more than 16Mb, so I changed my position to having four 16Mb sticks in there unless/until you run one of the dumb-ass overRAM games, then just take out a pair or three if needed. Ahh.. yea, that is a decent point. What about trying to run them in a virtual machine? Anyone ever give that a try? It'd be pretty dope if you could just launch vmware or something, and have it emulate the older hardware. CPU speed is trivial to throttle back in DOS, using a tool like SloMo. This is why I'd recommend a mid-range Pentium 1; and if you have one of those games that ran in super-fast mode because it was written on 386s and they didn't hook the system clock to gauge speed, just load SloMo in memory and you're good to go. Yea, that's why the CPU speed isn't a big issue. "Money isn't everything... It's also the goods and services that you can buy with the money." |
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Posted by Stealth
on Wednesday May 28, 2008 @ 07:25am >> [ reply ][ rating +1 ] What about trying to run them in a virtual machine? Anyone ever give that a try? It'd be pretty dope if you could just launch vmware or something, and have it emulate the older hardware. There is some software i've seen but haven't tried out yet. Maybe that's a better idea then just building another box. As if I need more freaking boxes around my desk. http://www.dosbox.com/ http://www.dosgames.com/essential.php - stealth - "Stuff sold by the gram is always going to be more exciting than stuff sold by the pound" - J. Clarkson |
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Posted by tele
on Tuesday June 3, 2008 @ 09:43am >> [ reply ][ rating +1 ] That pretty much solves it. Because like this thread is indicating, it's hard to know just where to stop in making an oldschool box. Origin was always out there making games that ran well on the "next generation" of systems, so if you set a cut-off point somewhere you're losing the ability to do some bad-ass games. But if you build it to spec for the bad-ass games you're potentially leaving some others behind. Interesting side note. When I was clearing out my hard drives the other day I came across all of my oldschool. Loaded up Buzz Aldrins Race Into Space just to see what would happen. Worked flawlessly! Played it without a hitch for 4+ hours. Goddamn I *love* that game! |
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Posted by voltaic
on Wednesday May 28, 2008 @ 07:43am >> [ reply ][ rating +0 ] DosBox is effing awesome. I totally didn't even think of running in a virtual machine (+1 to krux) but that program is supposed to be 99% compatible with old games, etc. Well, this is by far the least painful (and cheapest) thing I've done for a broad. ha ha ha... it only goes down hill from here... -stealth |
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Posted by Stealth
on Wednesday May 28, 2008 @ 03:02pm >> [ reply ][ rating +0 ] DosBox is effing awesome. I totally didn't even think of running in a virtual machine (+1 to krux) but that program is supposed to be 99% compatible with old games, etc. that's why God gave us dual/quad cores. hehehe.. VM is cool for some things. |