The Old Ways

The Old Ways

The Old Ways

How to trick your ancient dos games into working properly on hardware that they were never intended to be played on.

A surprising number of old games will play nice with Windows XP though Vista's proving to be one hurdle too many for a great deal more. The first thing to try if your classic of choice is too bewildered by the new operating system is compatibility mode - right-click on its main executable, choose the Compatibility tab and experiment with the various different versions of Windows on offer until (and if) you find one that actually works.

If you don't, an easy option remains. DOSBox emulates the old command-line, minimal-memory environment these games were made for, and it's now slick enough to make most DOS games play near-perfectly. Unfortunately, it does require a spot of manual tinkering. Grab it from dosbox.com and install it somewhere obvious on your hard drive. Then copy the game you want to play to a short-named folder on the root of your drive - eg. C: colonization. Launch DOSBox and you'll be met with the horror of a command prompt. Don't worry, all you need to do is type mount c c:xcom.' Replace the first 'c' with another drive letter if you want - it's only virtual, so it doesn't matter.

The game folder should then be treated as a drive of its own - in this example, type 'c,' press [Enter], then type 'dir' to see what's there. Look for a .bat, .com or .exe that will run the game - type its name and it should play. If you're having speed problems, press [Ctrl]+[Fl2] as many times as necessary to increase emulated CPU speed. If that doesn't help, try turning up frame-skipping - [Ctrl]+[F8] will do that If all that sounds like too much hassle, try out the D-Fend Reloaded GUI frontend (dfendreloaded.sourceforge.net) - this'll let you create permanent launchers for each of your DOS games, without having to mess about with all that command line nonsense.

If it's specifically classic LucasArts adventure games you're wanting to play again - and you're really not alone in this: Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max et al inspire a fanatical following to this day - you're really in luck.

SCUMMvm is a splendid app dedicated to running these (and, of late, a slew of third-party point 'n' clickers) in modern Windows, complete with upscaling to high resolutions, and it's incredibly simple to use. Find it at www.scummvm.org.

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