Dos games with Vista x64? Best process

danceMB

danceMB

danceMB

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I do have a top of the line machine so I can play whatever new game, but I crave quite a few games that only seem to run under a DOS environment, and no matter what I have tried, they dont want to work correctly.

The games that I have and want ro run are:

Crusader - No Remorse
Crusader - No Regret
Theme Park
Pro Pinball - The Web

These would be the top 4 games that do not want to play ball, and as they are no old none of the makers will make patches to make them work any other way than the DOS.

So please people, help me out! An "idiots guide" would be ideal ;)
 
Any ideas, guys? I have heard of DOS Box, but it is so confusing to use, and doesnt look like the mouse would want to work with any of the games :(
 
Mouse would definitely work with dosbox.

It's quite easy to use.

Start dosbox
Hit enter after each of the following instructions:
Type in: ''mount c m:\'' ( with m:\ being the hard drive which your games are on, so if it's c: then do mount c c:\ )
Type ''c:'
Type in cd and then the directory your game is in eg. ''cd games\civilization''
If you've done this correctly it should say "c:\games\civilization\'' before the flashing cursor thingy.
Then type in the name of the .exe which runs the game ( type dir to see a list of files in that folder in case you don't know the exe, also sometimes games run with a .bat file.)
Play.
 
Crusader - No Remorse
Crusader - No Regret
Click to expand...

:D!

I've had these games for YEARS and never played them because I couldn't get them to work when I first bought them, as a young and foolish child. I could nowadays, but never bothered to try. Might at some point!
 
snowdog said:
Mouse would definitely work with dosbox.

It's quite easy to use.

Start dosbox
Hit enter after each of the following instructions:
Type in: ''mount c m:\'' ( with m:\ being the hard drive which your games are on, so if it's c: then do mount c c:\ )
Type ''c:'
Type in cd and then the directory your game is in eg. ''cd games\civilization''
If you've done this correctly it should say "c:\games\civilization\'' before the flashing cursor thingy.
Then type in the name of the .exe which runs the game ( type dir to see a list of files in that folder in case you don't know the exe, also sometimes games run with a .bat file.)
Play.
Click to expand...

yep and you can make a separate instance of dosbox for each game and then edit the conf file and put the lines needed to run the game your playing under where it says autoexec then just put a shortcut to the dosbox exe somewhere so you dont have to type lots of stuff every time you want to play said game
 
DOSBox is, bizarrely, just as easy to use as DOS ;)

Make a folder to be your games directory, and navigate to it in the same way as you would do in DOS, using cd to change directory and then typing the location.
 
The only difference is that you need you need to mount a drive/folder but as jamies said all that can be done with the autoexec file.
 
Or you could use one of the many DOSBox frontends, last one I used was DOSBox Game Launcher which did the job nicely.
 
I will have to try that. Im in the middle of another game at the moment but as soon as ive finished and find some time I will try and copy everything from the CD into one folder, then try the process and see if I get anu joy out of it. I hope I do, as would love to hear the sound of the game again. Good days :rolleyes:

Thing is, would that work, as you normally have to install the game to the HDD first?
 
I don't use dosbox but I would imagine for games that need installing, you would run the installer the first time (from within dosbox), install it onto a dosbox mounted drive, and run the .exe from wherever you installed it.
 
So how would I get a game to install & then get to play, from start to finish, as I know nothing about DOS Box or these special mounted drives. I know a bit of stuff, but nothing in this territory :(
 
I'm no expert either, but I would say that you have to create a mounted drive (nothing special, just a folder which DOSbox believes to be your regular hard drive) and then run the installer as usual, via DOSbox. It will install to the DOSbox mounted drive folder, and you can then run it as described above.
 
danceMB said:
So how would I get a game to install & then get to play, from start to finish, as I know nothing about DOS Box or these special mounted drives. I know a bit of stuff, but nothing in this territory :(
Click to expand...

Although Snowdog's explanation is correct for the folder for games, you will need to mount the CDROM drive as well to be able to access it to install games.

To mount a cd drive type:

"mount d D:\ -t cdrom -usecd 0 -ioctl" where D:\ is you drive letter (don't type the quote marks) and 0 is the number reported when you type "mount -cd".
 
Would it be easier if I install all the CD contents to a folder somewhere on the HDD? Then I would not need to worry about mounting the CD ROM drive
 
some games are allot faster when running directly from hdd so yeah i'd reccommend running from hdd. the game im about to describe is seriously slow from cds in dosbox plus requires disk swapping so i put it on my hdd instead, the difference is phenomenal

first i type mount c c:\dos. this directory on my hdd holds all my dos games installed files so whenever i type c: in dosbox it only sees that directory as the hdd. (dosbox recommends not mounting your entire hdd as an hdd in dosbox)

you'd still have to mount a cdrom, you'd just have to tell it to go to the hdd so the emulator thinks that is a cdrom. To do that you'd type a line like this

mount d c:\oldgames\pandora1 -t cdrom -label pandora1

this tells the emulator that directory on my hdd is a cdrom, it has the contents of the first disk of tex murphy the pandora directive - sometimes you wont need to specify the disk -label but sometimes it is needed for a disk to work off the hdd.

i then do this with all the games 6 cds as it supports multiple cdrom drives changing the drive letter from d to e or whatever else where appropriate.

i then type d: to get into the pandora directive cd 1 and type the games setup exe to go through the install process. it installs the game to c:\pandora which actually is c:\dos\pandora on my real hdd

i then type these lines into the conf file under where it says autoexec in the dosbox directory so i dont have to mount all 6 cds and the hdd every time i play the game

mount c c:\dos
mount d c:\oldgames\pandora1 -t cdrom -label pandora1
mount e c:\oldgames\pandora2 -t cdrom -label pandora2
mount f c:\oldgames\pandora3 -t cdrom -label pandora3
mount g c:\oldgames\pandora4 -t cdrom -label pandora4
mount h c:\oldgames\pandora5 -t cdrom -label pandora5
mount i c:\oldgames\pandora6 -t cdrom -label pandora6
c:
cd\pandora
pandora

these lines tell the emulator on launch to use
-c:\dos as the hdd
-tells the emulator it has 6 cdrom drives attached to it each with a different game disk inside - the game is setup to look for each disk in these dirives from installation so no disk swapping!
-then the usual dos process to start any game allready installed - switch to the correct drive, switch to the right directory and the name of the exe file.

might also be worth noting not to use directorys with more than 8 letters as this is dos's limit
 
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