"Stephen S. Lee" wrote:
>
> I presume you're leaving OS problems out of this. Assuming we're talking
> about a DOS game, usually my DOS 6.2 boot disk makes it playable; there
> are only a handful that insist on something lower (the real old stuff
> being mostly self-booters). The only game in my collection that requires
> <6.2 is Zone 66.
Yes, I was assuming that you/anyone was running pure DOS to play the game.
Some older games require 3.3 and even 2.11 (2.0 if you don't need to use a hard
drive), but they are few and far between.
> Interestingly, sometimes sound problems that had speed as their root cause
> would sometimes play fine and sometimes not, like so:
>
> C:\GAMES\FOO>foo
>
> Cannot initialize sound, aborting.
>
> C:\GAMES\FOO>foo
>
> (and now the game plays normally and sound works fine)
Right; see my Adlib rant to Lee. If the program tried to init and didn't get a
result status quickly enough, it aborts -- but that status is waiting to be
read the second time you run the program. Isn't this fun?
> Secret of Monkey Island II behaves this way on my modern computer, as do a
> couple other that I have written down that I can't recall.
You can force SoMI II's sound usage; supply a command-line option and it won't
use it's detection routines and should start fine every time. I wrote about
that in the July 2000 issue of PC Gamer for the "Best Games of All Time" CDROM.
> I once decided to sit down and try to get every single game in my
> collection to work on my modern computer. Well, it isn't so modern any
> more, but ah well, it should still be good enough to play Civ III, Heroes
> IV, MOO III, Warcraft III, and Wizardry VIII. Anyway, I managed to get
> nearly everything to play properly with appropriate tweaking. One game
> that notably refused to behave was The Two Towers, which was glitchy in
> VGA mode though okay in EGA mode. I even e-mailed its designer asking for
> help, to no avail. I still keep and maintain the list.
The Two Towers? I haven't run that one, but if it was programmed after 1990,
there's a good chance it uses a tweaked video mode that isn't set up properly.
Either that, or timing issues rear their ugly head and the program writes to
the ports faster than the card can process them. Or your VGA card isn't 100%
compatible with what the developer had in his machine. :-) Let me take a wild
guess here: In VGA, the program doesn't scroll smoothly? Screen panning is
all jerky, right? Or is it that the colors are all wrong? (another common
problem)
> Is the 386 really all that necessary? For everything I know of, you don't
> need that; you only need the 8088 with its oddball hardware, and the 486.
> If I fiddle with the BIOS on the 486, it's easy to cripple to 286-ish
> speed or to 386-ish speed (and adjust a little more with software slowdown
> if needed).
If you have very finite control of your 486, then yes, you don't need the 386.
I have never had more control over the speed of my 486 other than disabling the
L1 cache, the L2 cache, and lowering the speed from 33 to 8MHz. All three of
those result in 8 different speeds, but nothing quite hits the sweet spot of a
16MHz 386.
> I suppose I would need the extra computers if my taste didn't lean heavily
> to adventure/RP/puzzle/strategy games.
Yes. Action-oriented games (racing, shooters, arcade, etc.) are the most
affected by speed problems. And guess what kinds of games I like? ;-)
> I plan on acquiring an XT eventually (640K, 80MB hard drive, DOS 3.3, the
> works :) but thought that an EGA card would work fine; I thought EGA and
> the original VGA cards were fully backward-compatible WRT CGA (most modern
> cards aren't). Is this not true?
This is, sadly, not true. This is because of the very nature of VGA's design:
Some CGA control ports are re-used *for different purposes* on EGA and VGA.
Ever play Leisure Suit Larry 2 on a true CGA card? It (and a handful of other
programs) tweaks a neat "third" CGA palette: White, Red, Cyan, and the
background color. The register used to do this is used for something else on a
VGA, so it doesn't do the same thing; running Leisure Suit Larry 2 in CGA on a
VGA card results in the standard White, Magenta, Cyan, and background color
palette. (LSL2 is a bad example because it also supports EGA and this
situation would never come up in practice, but you get the idea.)
Now, one thing that older EGA and VGA cards *could* do was lock their register
set into "CGA emulation mode". This was done via a vendor-supplied program and
it was different from machine to machine, but when you were in "CGA emulation
mode", the VGA card emulated CGA perfectly, even down to the 8x8 character cell
font. The drawback of this, of course, was that trying to play an EGA or VGA
game in CGA emulation mode would fail. So you'd have to use the program to
switch it back (or reboot, with some vendors) if you wanted to go back to
EGA/VGA.
> Also, where can I find one of these suckers? They seem to be starting to
> get to be hard to find. 386's still seem to be readily available for $30
> or so, but every time I've tried (admittedly not too hard) to locate an XT
> (preferably already equipped with 640K and a hard drive, since I'm not too
> keen on learning *that* much about its weird hardware) I couldn't.
ebay is my suggestion, but the shipping costs will kill you ($50 usually).
I've done this successfully for one of my 5160s. However, be absolutely sure
that you work out a couple of things:
- Make the seller guarantee "no dead-on-arrival" (no DOA) If it gets damaged
in transport, you don't want to be stuck with it. It also makes him package it
better since HE doesn't want to be stuck with it.
- Make the seller turn it on and verify it boots. I avoided a DOA this way.
- If it matters to you, make sure it's really an XT (use model number to
verify). I bought an "XT" only to find out it was a PC with a (dead) hardcard
cobbled in.
Other things of note:
- Any listing that refers to the model number (5150 for PC, 5160 through 5163
for XT) is probably from a seller with a head on his shoulders. Prefer those
guys over people who list "IBMPC RARE ORIGINAL L@@K!!!" as those people
probably don't have kloo.
- Try to verify it has an actual CGA card for maximum compatibility. If you
see a picture of the back of the case and the CGA card also has an RCA jack on
it, get it -- that's a composite video output! Use it and you can play
original MS Flight Simulator in 16 colors if you connect it to a TV! Same goes
for some other games.
Maybe I should start a "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" ;-D
--
http://www.MobyGames.com/
The world's most comprehensive gaming database project.
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