Happy joy VMware player!

[Plane Sailing]

I've just got the free VMware player installed, and loaded up a freedos image, which is a publicly available clone of DOS.

Why?

So I can play some of my old dos-based games of course, most notably System Shock. OK, I've not got the sound working yet, but apart from that it is running more smoothly than it ever was in the old days, and I'm looking forward to having fun blasting mutants and dismembering robots. I hope I *can* get the sound working, because I'm looking forward to hearing Shodan's spooky voice again...

The freedos VMware image is found here http://www.3works.it/download/index.html and the vmware player is a free download from www.vmware.com.

Join me in my retro gaming delights!

Cheers

 

[azhrei_fje]

Heh-heh, have fun!

I have a CD with 9 of the old AD&D games on them (Pool of Radiance and all that). But running it on a new machine ("new" meaning anything after 1990) causes the delay loops to be waaaaaay too fast. I finally hacked the games and changed the delay loops to have much longer intervals. It really should be done by replacing those loops with timer calls into the BIOS, but that's a significantly more complicated patch. (If anyone wants the patches, I'd be willing to send them. You'll need the original game, though; what I have are just the patched executables or instructions on how to patch them yourself.)

 

[ssampier]

Sounds like a neat approach.

I imagine you'd still have to edit autoexec.bat and config.sys files?

I have been jonesin' to play Crusader: No Remorse lately; Not sure if I still have that game, though

 

[Mycanid]

Sounds good Sailing.

 

[Fenlock]

DOSBox (http://dosbox.sf.net) is also a good way to run old dos games on a windows/linux box.

//F

 

[azhrei_fje]

And there are others. QEMU, VirtualBox, and Xen all have the ability to boot multiple operating systems.

Xen is the most intrusive since the machine must boot into a hypervisor initially and from there multiple OSes can be executed (this is not virtualization, per se, but partitioning). Plus, those OSes will likely require changes to support Xen (not sure which DOS emulators provide Xen support at the moment)...