5th February 2004, 7:06 PM
XP is a great system based on NT, which is FAR more stable than any 9x OS can hope to be. However, if one wants to retro game, 98 Second Edition is a must. ME is TERRIBLE because of what they did to it. They stripped it of it's auto-loading DOS components, thus meaning DOS is ALMOST completely gone from ME. One can still "cheat" and get DOS up and running via a boot disk, but the "new" version of DOS built into that startup disk is actually worse than the DOS included in 98. Why? It's got terrible game support. The ME DOS was made pretty much to get any utilities one needs to run running to fix any problems with ME. It wasn't made for gaming, and it shows. So, if you want to run a good chunk of old DOS games, you gotta have an old DOS compatible OS. Lots of people have older computers for this very reason, but I don't want to have to put together various stages of computing just to get all my games running. Others have what I have, a duel boot system. XP for everyday use, and 98SE for old games. Honestly, ME could have been a good system had they not felt the need to strip out all the DOS components. In fact, a LOT of the instability comes from this stripping (the OTHER half comes from the less than stellar version of system restore built into it, but that's another story, at least XP's system restore is VERY well done).
Anyway, ABF does need to eventually upgrade or even downgrade. ME is the worst OS one can use (except for the OS I made out of some of the more high tech leaves I found in the woods one day) for any purpose. From what I gather, he never got 98SE at any point, or the first 98. While SE is better due to USB support (and updated driver database, though that wouldn't matter with today's hardware :D), 98 would do if he didn't have any USB devices. 95, any edition, would be terrible since 98 pretty much was made to make up for all the terrible glitches 95 was filled with.
As I think I said before, I have a duel boot system. It's a fairly good solution, though even it's not perfect as I'll explain. If ABF could get his hands on an old copy of 98SE and XP Prof (another thing to make clear, Proffesional is better than home edition, and the reason is due to the ridiculous copyright protection schemes that would force anyone with home to call MS constantly during a computer upgrade, or when XP needs to be reinstalled, or when a large game is installed, or when it feels like it, or when it TRIES to get you to call but instead the copyright scheme causes the system to crash). It's not that I don't give MS credit for trying to protect their copyrights, but rather that the METHOD they picked for home edition pretty much ends up screwing over the legitimate buyer while the one who steals a copy is likely just going to get Proffesional anyway. Problem is, unless you happen to be going to a college with some free software deal with MS, or work for a company that happens to have a deal itself with MS for free software Prof is about $100 more than Home.
Anyway, my duel boot works out pretty well MOST of the time. All the old windows 3.x games (tending to have their problems due to things like using DOS for sound (ala KQ6) and early non-directx Win95 games (the ones that all have problems in XP) work great in 98SE as they should. (Actually, those early 95 game's only issue in XP is the fact that the 640x480 compatibility option in XP doesn't work at ALL (though the 256 color depth option works fine.) so games either refuse to work at the normal resolution or are all shrunken in the smallest resolutiuon XP normally goes down to. Well, there is a way to force XP down to 640x480 256c via an option menu, but it's very awkward to get to and switch it on when I want to play it, though oddly enough resetting and selecting another OS doesn't seem to bother me that much. :D) Most DOS games that wouldn't work before do work now too. However, the age of the games still shows even in this environment. Wing Commander 4 for instance crashes every time it gets to a movie file, so I can't get past the installation screen (the game starts out with an FMV). Kingdom O' Magic has an odd glitch in which all the pure black colored parts of the screen are instead a constant flash of random colors. Fortunatly, the game is still playable since little on the screen is pure black, but selecting conversation options is hard on the brain. Well, MOST games working is better than XP, where ONLY the most simple of games (for example, none can use the sound card) can be run.
While most games work fine, I'd really like to be able to play ALL my games without resorting to building an old computer specifically for them. The key is compatibility that works via directx so that hardware changes are irrelevent since all the commands are interpretted via the directx engine rather than direct access. I've tried one DOS emulator, but I can't find out how to turn off the controlled speed feature to get games running at "normal" speed. The slowdown feature in that one is nice on some occasions, but not all the time. Hopefully in the future a REALLY good DOS emulator that works via directx will come out and I'll be able to run whatever old DOS game I want without issue. The other issue is for MS to finally fix XP's compatibility options. A lot of stuff does indeed work as it should, but that resolution thing being completely non-functional is just bad design. On another note, for those old windows 3.x games that use DOS for some things like sound (KQ6 is the only one I can think of now) a decent DOS emulator should have a command line interface so one can setup a special shortcut for the emulator with a hyphen and then the directory of the windows program that needs that so the emulator will automatically start hidden in the background just before the game itself starts up and close itself when the game shuts down, thus allowing the game to use the emulator for whatever DOS functions it needs.
Anyway, ABF does need to eventually upgrade or even downgrade. ME is the worst OS one can use (except for the OS I made out of some of the more high tech leaves I found in the woods one day) for any purpose. From what I gather, he never got 98SE at any point, or the first 98. While SE is better due to USB support (and updated driver database, though that wouldn't matter with today's hardware :D), 98 would do if he didn't have any USB devices. 95, any edition, would be terrible since 98 pretty much was made to make up for all the terrible glitches 95 was filled with.
As I think I said before, I have a duel boot system. It's a fairly good solution, though even it's not perfect as I'll explain. If ABF could get his hands on an old copy of 98SE and XP Prof (another thing to make clear, Proffesional is better than home edition, and the reason is due to the ridiculous copyright protection schemes that would force anyone with home to call MS constantly during a computer upgrade, or when XP needs to be reinstalled, or when a large game is installed, or when it feels like it, or when it TRIES to get you to call but instead the copyright scheme causes the system to crash). It's not that I don't give MS credit for trying to protect their copyrights, but rather that the METHOD they picked for home edition pretty much ends up screwing over the legitimate buyer while the one who steals a copy is likely just going to get Proffesional anyway. Problem is, unless you happen to be going to a college with some free software deal with MS, or work for a company that happens to have a deal itself with MS for free software Prof is about $100 more than Home.
Anyway, my duel boot works out pretty well MOST of the time. All the old windows 3.x games (tending to have their problems due to things like using DOS for sound (ala KQ6) and early non-directx Win95 games (the ones that all have problems in XP) work great in 98SE as they should. (Actually, those early 95 game's only issue in XP is the fact that the 640x480 compatibility option in XP doesn't work at ALL (though the 256 color depth option works fine.) so games either refuse to work at the normal resolution or are all shrunken in the smallest resolutiuon XP normally goes down to. Well, there is a way to force XP down to 640x480 256c via an option menu, but it's very awkward to get to and switch it on when I want to play it, though oddly enough resetting and selecting another OS doesn't seem to bother me that much. :D) Most DOS games that wouldn't work before do work now too. However, the age of the games still shows even in this environment. Wing Commander 4 for instance crashes every time it gets to a movie file, so I can't get past the installation screen (the game starts out with an FMV). Kingdom O' Magic has an odd glitch in which all the pure black colored parts of the screen are instead a constant flash of random colors. Fortunatly, the game is still playable since little on the screen is pure black, but selecting conversation options is hard on the brain. Well, MOST games working is better than XP, where ONLY the most simple of games (for example, none can use the sound card) can be run.
While most games work fine, I'd really like to be able to play ALL my games without resorting to building an old computer specifically for them. The key is compatibility that works via directx so that hardware changes are irrelevent since all the commands are interpretted via the directx engine rather than direct access. I've tried one DOS emulator, but I can't find out how to turn off the controlled speed feature to get games running at "normal" speed. The slowdown feature in that one is nice on some occasions, but not all the time. Hopefully in the future a REALLY good DOS emulator that works via directx will come out and I'll be able to run whatever old DOS game I want without issue. The other issue is for MS to finally fix XP's compatibility options. A lot of stuff does indeed work as it should, but that resolution thing being completely non-functional is just bad design. On another note, for those old windows 3.x games that use DOS for some things like sound (KQ6 is the only one I can think of now) a decent DOS emulator should have a command line interface so one can setup a special shortcut for the emulator with a hyphen and then the directory of the windows program that needs that so the emulator will automatically start hidden in the background just before the game itself starts up and close itself when the game shuts down, thus allowing the game to use the emulator for whatever DOS functions it needs.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)