I want a 386 DOS emulator
For windows =)
No I dont want to reboot into DOS mode and run Moslo.
Can't somebody make a program to better emulate DOS? Like for instance in a window?
The 386 was the golden age of gaming. Imagine if someone made a 386 emulator for the Palm or other hand held. I'd by it in a heartbeat. You's instantly have access to hundreds of classic games.
All the SSI Gold Box rpg's. i.e. Curse of the Azure Bonds and Champions of Krynn
All Ultimas and Wizardy games.
All the good Wing Commanders. (1,2 the expansions and Privateer)
Cresent Hawks Inception and Cresent Hawks Revenge.
Might and Magic 3, 4 and 5
Eye of the Beholder
the first Lands of Lore
Kings Bounty which is the first true Heroes of Might and Magic game.
King's Quest
The Legend of Kyrandia
Im sure you guys have fond memories of other titles.
Being fangoriously devoured by a gelatinous monster.
Here''s something I''ve discovered about nostalgia. Enjoy it, love it, but don''t relive it. Everytime I think things like, ''My goodness, I have such fond memories of playing the SSI Gold Box sets, I should play them again'' I hit myself in the head until the impulse goes away. Much like a Taiwanese Brothel, the past is not a place best revisited in anywhere but your imagination. The fact seems to be that somewhere between the point where you actually played something, and, say, now, my mind improves my perception of the actual experience, and the moment you actually try and sit down to play these games in a present day setting, you see all the flaws, faults, and shortcomings that it wouldn''t have occured to you to see before. I loved almost every game you mentioned, and if I''m very very lucky, I''ll never play them again.
I felt -- I feel -- that Shawn, Rob and Julian were making out with the game, and as their friend I felt it was important to point out that they were making out with an ugly chick. - Cory Banks, keeping it real
DOSBox does what you are aiming for.
http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/
Another alternative would be BOCHS:
http://bochs.sourceforge.net/
You need a partition with DOS though for BOCHS afaik.
Third alternative is VDM:
http://ntvdm.cjb.net/
I haven''t tried BOCHS but I tried the other two. Let''s put it this way: If you own one of the Goldbox games for example, I would say its completely legit to download the appropriate Amiga ADF. The reason for this is that the Amiga emulator WinUAE
http://winuae.sourceforge.net/
does a far better job for playing these, because you do not have to fear the problem of games running too fast. Also the gfx and sound are almost identical on these games for both Amiga and PC versions.
Other really great DOS/Amiga games:
Chaos Engine
Speedball 2
Another World
Flashback
Cannon Fodder
Lemmings
Moonstone
Syndicate
Magic Carpet
Dungeon Keeper
MDK
I must say it is still as fun to play these games today then it was back then
. One more thing: I am not advertising piracy here with my suggestions to fangblackbone to download the adf. I also own all the above mentioned games so please no discussion about piracy here 
.
Addendum: some more emulators I haven''t tried myself yet, so I cannot give you anymore information:
http://www.mess.org/
http://www.oldskool.org/pc/flopper/
http://www.pocketdos.com/
No hay banda!
Oh but I do know all to well the rose tinted nostalgia.
Case in point is something like the Smurf game for Colecovision. That game had the best graphics untill I visited a retro site and saw screens and went ""ugh thats not what it looks like!"" Though, I remember exactly how crappy the intelivision sports games looked and the point was how they played. You can have all your high heat, all star and world series baseball. I''ll stick with the venerable Baseball Stars 2 for the Neo Geo. Best. Baseball Game. EVAR.
The gold box series suffers greatly in the earlier editions with interface problems. You have to press 3 keys just to do any action (attack, cast, delay). Pool of Radiance suffers from the nuance of having to actually cast heal on your party members, then rest, then repeat. Later versions would automatically heal while you rested. Character look customization was painful too. Early levels they would have the f''ed up battles with all mages in the back row casting sleep on your whole party. Despite all that games like Curse of the Azure bonds stand as a true classic. The character development is awesome and the battle tactics are the foundation of any turn based game today.
In Privateer and Wing Commander, while the graphics dont make me drool, the game is a story driven shooter. Nothing really to gloss over there its pure unadulterated fun. The in game cut scenes will be charmingly funny now.
Cresent Hawks Revenge is one of the founding fathers of the RTS genre and is still quite good. Much like the internet and the jet engine, you cant really attribute the roots of the RTS game to one person, company or game.
So thats the descriminating factor for a classic. Is it eternal or rosy?
Being fangoriously devoured by a gelatinous monster.
What a killjoy. I expect that sort of talk from Certis or maybe Sway, but not you.
"Men like sex, thus boobies! Oogaba!" - dejanzie
"Butt hat is my opinion and we all know how far that goes around here." - Demonicmaster
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Recently installed Monkey Island and beat it again. Still an incredibly beautiful and atmospheric game. The great music completes the full nostalgia kickback.
Neither Certis nor Sway would''ve put a Taiwan Brothel metaphor in there for you. That''s just what I bring to the table.
I felt -- I feel -- that Shawn, Rob and Julian were making out with the game, and as their friend I felt it was important to point out that they were making out with an ugly chick. - Cory Banks, keeping it real
TY TY TY chrisg!
DOSBox works like a charm!
Hahaha nothing like the giggly goodness of Dark Queen of Krynn!
It didn''t work with Curse of the Azure Bonds but I can wait...
The compatability list is rather large.
The creators of DOSBox are missing out. I think there is a huge potential market with hand helds! For a lot of games they''d have to make a keyboard emulator front end so you can use your stylus.
Who wouldn''t want to play Battlechess on their Palm?
Being fangoriously devoured by a gelatinous monster.
Speaking of Battle Chess, I think a new version is long overdue, eh?
Seriously, chessmaster gets boring.
--
Come Play Team Fortress 2 with the cool kids! GWJ's Stan's Lounge Pub: 63.209.34.11:27015
7-8pm central time, every day. It's free! =D
A Battlechess RPG!!!
Like Archon but turned based. That and you can level up your pieces.
A wargame with chess pieces that you level up with side quests.
Imagine bishops and rooks that can only move 3 spaces until you level them up? Allow 2 or more leveled up pawns to occupy one tile? Chess boards that are like other PnP maps with height bonuses and land type penalties...
I mean isnt Chess the ultimate turn based wargame?
Being fangoriously devoured by a gelatinous monster.
LOL! You may be on to something here!
I mean, chess, it deserves a sequel
Add boobs to the queen, and you can sell it to Eidos!
--
Come Play Team Fortress 2 with the cool kids! GWJ's Stan's Lounge Pub: 63.209.34.11:27015
7-8pm central time, every day. It's free! =D
Hell, dont stop there, add boobs to all the other pieces. Call it ""DOA:Xtreme Chess(t)""(tm). Then pay me royalties for the name!
"It's like watching the best parts of my childhood being showered in a torrent of pig feces." - mediocrepoet
While I understand your opinion, I personally have no problems replaying older games - I often go waay to out of my way to purchase old console games. fangblackbone''s Smurfs post, coupled with JD''s Monkey Island post speak volumes, and are a good example as to how well retro games hold up. In my opinion, the Monkey Island games are even more enjoyable to play now than when I was younger - I understand a lot more of the jokes now and can appreciate just how well constructed it is. And then you have old games that you loved as a kid that just don''t hold up over time.
For example, a few months ago I was at a dull-as-dirt party until a friend of mine discovered a NES with a copy of MegaMan 2 hidden away in a corner. We hooked it up and proceeded to spend two hours playing it from beginning to end, remembering all of the pitfalls and tricky timing to a very scary extent. And we still had boatloads of fun.
Personally, I think there are a very small number of games that are classics, and will hold up no matter how many years will pass. Just like with any other medium, you will always have works that were initially impressive, but loose their luster over the years. And then there are films, paintings, TV shows that hold up or increase in quality through aging. The tough part is just trying to figure out which old games will continue to bring you joy and which games will make you regret the hours you wasted as a young one.
Chicago-Style Drunksaling
I still like to play Xcom time to time. Have been trying to get Syndicate working but no luck :/
There IS something about old games that makes you all...wet.
i remember the issue of my beloved Russian game magazine Game.exe when those guys went completely nuts and devoted ALL the magazine to vintage games only. They dug up old interviews with Tom Hall about ""upcoming"" Doom and Lord British about ""upcoming"" Ultima7. Each classic game got review (with ratings:) and text was written as the game had hit the shelf just last week.
Imagine my emotions when I opened the mail box, took out The Magazine and there is.... Defender of the Crown on COVER!
Gamer`s choice so to say...
frickin hardocore, if you ask me
I still keep that issue as one of my treasures.
I`m Artsy Partsy Gun For Hire
Inbetween bouts of wanting to kick several PC''s to pieces and trying to figure out why 3 linked PC''s wouldn''t chat to each other and trying to get some LAN gaming fun over the weekend Me and my friends reinstaled what used to be our favourite RTS, Total Annihalation....
Five minutes later we were looking at each other and asking, ""is it us or is this game now very dated? I seem to remember this being better than it now seems."" followed swiftly by the uninstall button.
It''s sad really I wanted to relly enjoy TA again but after games like Medieval total war and C&C generals it really is dated and is actually a pain to play. X-Com also suffered from this problem, Loved the game but EEEEEEWWWWW look at those graphics! Where are my Polygon units! (aside from the fact the game ran so fast on my 2.6Ghz machine that you couldn''t keep up)
I now prefer not to revisit games I remember with rose hued memories, best let them rest in peace lest you dirty their memories!
MUST...STOP ...PLAYING ....SWG! MUST GET REAL LIFE BACK AGAIN!
""I said you, wife, that those shiny PCs wont do any good to kids. Spoiled rascals...khm..khm... where`s my shotgun...""
I`m Artsy Partsy Gun For Hire
I mostly just want Cyber Empires from Silicon Knights. That was a great giant robot turn-based/RTS/action hybrid.
Anyone who posted in this thread is a racist.*
*Except me. - Certis
ARISE!!
Eight year old thread and now the original request is answered.
While stuck in an airport yesterday waiting to go home, I discovered that there are front-ends for DOSBox that make it completely idiot-proof (which is convenient for me) to install and play classic games.
I grabbed Boxer -since I'm on a MBP. Also went out and grabbed Champions of Krynn, Death Knights of Krynn, and Dark Queen of Krynn and their associated manuals, journals, etc.
Man, I love these old games. I remember playing them for hours when I was in my early teens. I got seriously sucked into Champions of Krynn yesterday and can't wait to put in a little more time with it this weekend.
Next on the list is XCom and some old-school Might and Magic.
Anything I missed back in the day?
|Steam|
Have you tried the other Gold Box AD&D games?
Not since I was 13. But I intend to!
I had Secret of the Silver Blades, but not the prequel or sequel to it.
I'm having some trouble tracking them all down online. They're abandonware, I think...
|Steam|
Man I remember playing pool of radiance, at least 4 times. If only I still had the box that kept all those.
XBL/PS3/Steam: HappytimeHarry9 - Steam
No kidding.
I still have my Wasteland discs at my parent's house, but who has a 5.25" drive to read them?
|Steam|
I want to go back and play Sword of Aragon sometime. I know its out there. (I owned the original.) It crushed my 286 / 386 back in the day. The interface is archaic to say it nicely but.. I remember getting to the final battle and there were so many units on the battlefield for this turn based wargame, that it just never got to be my turn!
The only reason I'd ever want to download DOSBOX is to play my copy of Star Trek: A Final Unity, which I have never been able to play.
Blog | Backlog | Steam | Twitter | GWJ B.Net Info
I still use DOSBox all the time, mostly to fire up 1830, which is an excellent version of the classic Avalon Hill boardgame. It's pretty impenetrable at first, because the rules are pretty complex, and seem a bit arbitrary at first. But the computer opponents are just freaking awesome, and they can still give me a hard time, even after all these years.
Interestingly, there is only one bit of randomness in the entire game: who goes first. Everything after that is purely decision-making. You're trying to amass the largest personal fortune in the Age of Rail. You can succeed by running railroads well, but you can also succeed in the stock market, buying the right stocks at the right times, or by attacking stocks held by your opponents. One nasty tactic that's hard to pull off is to cripple a railroad and dump it on a strong competitor.
My only real complaint about the game is that you can't see everything at once. All the information from the boardgame is available to you, but you can't always get to everything in every screen. I'd love to see some kind of Windows wrapper around that basic DOS engine, just reading the state of the game and presenting it in multiple windows while you play. It's about all that thing needs to be perfect.
Best AI ever. Seriously. Those guys are little bastards, especially Gould.
Oh, I forgot to mention: The AI in this game is extremely CPU-intensive, and on Advanced mode, you ideally want about a 700Mhz machine to play it on. Even the new versions of DOSBox that do JIT compilation aren't that fast. But on a Sandy Bridge chip at 4.4Ghz, I'm able to run 1830 at 400 emulated Mhz, which is quite playable even on Advanced. (It does a ton of number crunching, thinking about everyone's possible moves; it doesn't look as far ahead on lower difficulties, so it doesn't need as much CPU grunt.) It's not quite ideal yet, but it's getting pretty close. Earlier chips rarely got much above 100-150Mhz, so Sandy Bridge is kind of a big deal for DOSBox.
Elewis17 wrote: