DOS Games Discussion

[Guest]

I have a bunch of wing commander games and I just came across them recently I need to find a version of DOS like 6.0 and a hard drive that will accept the os so i can play the games i figure i can use current graphic cards and sound cards let me know if i am wrong. when i go to computer stores i am laughed right out the door if you can direct me to where i can find what i need i would appreciate it. thank you.

[procerus]

What operating system are you using?

If it's XP then what file system (FAT32 or NTFS) is it running?

[Wally]

have a bunch of wing commander games and I just came across them recently I need to find a version of DOS like 6.0 and a hard drive that will accept the os so i can play the games i figure i can use current graphic cards and sound cards let me know if i am wrong. when i go to computer stores i am laughed right out the door if you can direct me to where i can find what i need i would appreciate it. thank you.


Microsoft should have dos 6.0 on the internet by now!!!

The computer store people should be more helpful than that!!

Try driverguide.com for drivers and try microsoft and see if they have dos 6.0

Edit Note: Wally4000, please help people instead of stating the obvious

[Guest]

I have a fat32 running xp the plan was to set up a slave drive with dos 6.0 or maybe a dos machine. If I could get these games to run on XP that would be great, but every attempt has been crash city. Your a little over my head I took a look at the sites you posted. I am not to familiar with DOS, I can do your basic operations but when it comes to moving things that could drop my pc like config.sys auto.exe I am still a hatchling. If you have any suggestion that would be great just dumb it down for me. Ill keep looking for a 6.0 version of dos but it hasn't been easy its an artifact these days. Thanks for your suggestions its given me a fresh start I dead ended for a bit.

[procerus]

If you're running FAT32 then you should try a boot (floppy) disk. Most of them come with everything already configured except your DOS sound drivers (which will be particular to your system). If you can find out the lines your sound card needs in config.sys/autoexec.bat then you'll have cracked it.

Just boot with the floppy in the drive. This will boot you into DOS. You then navigate to where the game is installed on the hard disk. Type "C:" without the quotes and hit return at the A:\> prompt to log onto your hard disk. Then navigate to the game directory by typing "CD *****" where the asterisks are the name of the directory. Then type the name of the game's executable to run it.

There are some boot disks to start you off here-
www.bootdisk.com

Sadly the boot disk I normally recommend's site is down. I'll post again later if I can find it somewhere else!

Or else use the

[Splodginator]

For NTFS there's NTFSDOS that makes NTFS Drives visible in DOS- thats how I can get my hard-drive (OEM-Formatted NTFS) to work in DOS with a boot disk.

[Tombstone]

Beyond a certain point, it's impossible to hobble a PC enough to accommodate some of the older games. It's not just a matter of speed, but the technology has changed so drastically, and in ways the game's designers could never have anticipated. They used things like direct port-writes, internal RAM counters, and other fun things that really don't work with today's modern hardware. And keep in mind that there's a significant difference between Windows' "DOS Mode" and true MS-DOS. They are not interchangable, particularly where these old games are concerned.

Read this treatise on the subject. It's exceptionally informative:

http://www.oldskool.org/pc/help/oldonnew/03_tweaking.shtml

Other than that, I'd suggest checking out this site, and maybe asking around in their forum:

Wing Commander Revival

You can find a Intel 386 40MHz desktop PC on eBay for about $30.00, guaranteed to run Wing Commander, Wing Commander II, and any other game made in the 1980's. That's your "least hassle" solution.