PC Love?

[theantmeister]

At the end of the day, there's no substitute for having an older machine handy. Build the most powerful PC that your OS of choice is capable of supporting and you'll have no trouble, but PC emulation is infinitely harder to accomplish than console emulation, and gets harder still the further back you go.

Actually, I find the opposite to be true. Emulating something as ancient as Alley Cat is dead simple using DOSBox, but just try and get Grim Fandango going!

And, really, I think DOSBox is better than an actual DOS PC. For one thing, you can configure the speed it runs at. Allowing you to play Montezuma's Revenge and Descent on the same PC. For another, you don't have to do any base memory fettling. DOSBox just gives a game as much memory as it wants. There's no drivers to install. You can choose any graphics or sound card you want... it's just brilliant.

[MattyC64c]

You know I've run many emulators for different systems but I haven't tried to use DosBox yet, funny that. I have a couple of old Dos games I'd like to get running again. One is Panzer General, and the other is Wing Commander III. Could I play those in DosBox and how easy is to configure?

[theantmeister]

Wing Commander 3 runs pretty well on Dosbox, the only trouble I had was joystick calibration. For some reason (probably timing or something), I just couldn't calibrate my joystick properly so I had to play with mouse and keyboard.

You just need to mount the cd and install the game. Oh, and when you need to swap disks just eject the one cd, put the other in and hit CTRL-F4 so that it knows you swapped them.

There are some useful tips on the DOSBox compatibility page. I just checked and there's a patch for the joystick issue I should probably follow my own advice!

[MattyC64c]

Wing Commander 3 runs pretty well on Dosbox, the only trouble I had was joystick calibration. For some reason (probably timing or something), I just couldn't calibrate my joystick properly so I had to play with mouse and keyboard.

You just need to mount the cd and install the game. Oh, and when you need to swap disks just eject the one cd, put the other in and hit CTRL-F4 so that it knows you swapped them.

There are some useful tips on the DOSBox compatibility page. I just checked and there's a patch for the joystick issue I should probably follow my own advice!

Cool, when I get chance I will have a look at DosBox and If I have a problem I'll know who to ask. Do you need to configure sound card settings in DosBox? How is the sound configured?

[theantmeister]

It can do Gravis or Soundblaster. I'm not sure which is enabled by default, it's probably best just to run the Wing Commander installer. It should just autodetect sound for you.

Sound in DOSBox is done in config files. You can download frontends like DFend that'll get around having to edit config files in notepad.

[tekaotaku]

didnt get a PC until around 1996-97 when I was leaving school and getting to collage. It was a packard Bell pentium 133Mhz, 1GB HDD, 2 MB S3Virge graphics, 16bit soundblaster (compatible)....it was a beast! for around 6 months lol....still got me into PC gaming, was fascitated by FMV games such as RIPPER, 7TH GUEST, KGB, PHANTASMAGORIA etc etc...but also introduced me to graphic adventures, INDIANA JONES, DAY OF THE TENTACLE, FULL THROTLE, THE DIG and of course FPS, DOOM, DARK FORCES, QUAKE, THE RIFT (excellent fps using the quake engine).

Eventualy upgraded the PB to a 200Mhz MMX, 128mb ram and 16MB Voodoo 2, 10GB HDD a few years later, then I got the internet (cable and wireless) and my games playing stopped! Became a MP3 downloader en masse and it wasnt much fun on 56k dial up but who knew any different at the time

The last proper desk top PC I owned was around 2003 - 04ish - built by my fair hands just to play Half Life 2 on, after that I got rid of it and have had Laptops ever since.

[GigaPepsiMan]

Painkiller has m,ade me love pc games again.

[MattyC64c]

Hey theantmeister, I just got Panzer General to work, I installed off the CD-Rom, That disc must be 17 years old! Worked fine though. Next gonna try WC III and IV.

[paranoid marvin]

Monkey Island 3 was the final straw that made me give up my Amiga and buy a PC. Tbh although the qualty of graphics have improved exponentially since, the quality of gameplay has not. The days of classic releases like Fate of Atlantis , DOTT , Rise Of the Triad , Outlaws , Tie Fighter , Dark Forces , Toonstruck , Wing Commander, Secret Weapons, Red Alert etc etc are well and truly in the past , and it's only sites like GOG and homebrew that is keeping the PC alive.

[IronMaidenRule]

Been playing games on the PC since about 1996 when my brother got an Olivetti PC. It was a Pentium P75 with about 4mb of Ram and a double speed CD-Rom Drive Some of the first games I played were Screamer, Command & Conquer, Doom, Quake and best of all Actua Soccer! I used to spend all of a Saturday at my brothers flat playing these games and actually getting used to using an operating system, I had an Amiga A1200 at home but never dabbled with workbench, just thrown in SWOS and away it went. I was eventually donated above said PC in 1999 when my Amiga could no longer hack it and I eventually learnt how to build my own systems soon after.

I do think PC gaming does not get as much coverage as other systems in RG, but on the other hand, there is probably other systems that feature less than the PC.

[William S]

Got my first PC in '97, I think. Mainly to play all the point & click classics I played on the Amiga 500,
games like Fate Of Atlantis, Day Of The Tentacle, Monkey Island 1 & 2, Simon The Sorcerer etc.
Then I went on to games like Broken Sword 1 & 2, Monkey Island 3, Full Throttle, Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within,
Toonstruck, Torin's Passage etc.
Just recently played Flight Of The Amazon Queen and Beneath A Steel Sky for the first time.
Still have quite a few classics left to play as well.

[theantmeister]

Hey theantmeister, I just got Panzer General to work, I installed off the CD-Rom, That disc must be 17 years old! Worked fine though. Next gonna try WC III and IV.

Cool

Did it work just with the defaults?

[MattyC64c]

Hey theantmeister, I just got Panzer General to work, I installed off the CD-Rom, That disc must be 17 years old! Worked fine though. Next gonna try WC III and IV.

Cool

Did it work just with the defaults?

I had to choose a sound card, two of them for this game. I chose a Sound Blaster Pro and the Roland. I'm assuming Dos Box must be emulating them, they worked fine. I've set Dos Box up now so that it automaticaly mounts C:\ drive and and a CD-Rom drive mapped to E:\

I've been holding this off for ages because I thought it might be a pain but the instructions at the Dos Box Wiki page were easy to follow.

[FatTrucker]

Got my first PC in '97, I think. Mainly to play all the point & click classics I played on the Amiga 500,
games like Fate Of Atlantis, Day Of The Tentacle, Monkey Island 1 & 2, Simon The Sorcerer etc.
Then I went on to games like Broken Sword 1 & 2, Monkey Island 3, Full Throttle, Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within,
Toonstruck, Torin's Passage etc.
Just recently played Flight Of The Amazon Queen and Beneath A Steel Sky for the first time.
Still have quite a few classics left to play as well.

Toonstruck has been added to ScummVM now so its cake to get working.

[supermario]

I've had a PC since about 1997 with various levels of power increse until my current one. About 5-6 years ago I thought the PC would be the best machine to play games on and held up to that point of view until COD Black Ops came out which my machine wouldn't run - found that a bit annoying as my 360 (which is older in terms of age and I've had for a few years) was able to run what I feel is basically the same game. Really enjoyed playing the various COD games on the PC with their DEDICATED SERVERS and games like Grid. Currently I just use it for Browsing and playing relatively simple games which is a bit of a shame as the power of it is totally wasted and I play all the on-line and single player games on the 360.