Nintendo next console images

[A Black Falcon]

"Need" to upgrade or downgrade. See, I knew ME was bad when I got it, but THIS bad? If I'd truly known I think I might have gone through the pain of installing Win98 on it... as I said we have Win98se from our previous computer at home. I've just never installed an OS before and didn't know if all the hardware would work... also, it's a major task and I just didn't think it was a good idea to try to do that. Installing OSes makes me hesitate especially if its removing the previous one too...

As for upgrading, no. I won't try. Not even remotely worth the effort. Anyway, from what I've seen of XP, I don't like the interface "improvements"... and I like DOS games working... though DOSBox and SCUMMVM mostly solve that problem, I'll admit. And having an OS that was actually stable and didn't constantly crash and mess up would be so, so nice... but still, it'd be installing a new OS. Not fun. And I'd have to reinstall EVERYTHING and I have so much installed... even if I take out my second HDD and use a new one or something to back up all the data from my current first drive (I do NOT trust MS to do something like a OS change without messing up and deleting data or the entire disc), I'd still have to reinstall all apps to get their reg keys in, and that would be a massive, massive task that I just don't want to do.

And anyway XP is pretty expensive and we don't have a copy. Unlike Win98 and below, when you buy a new computer now instead of actually giving you the OS they just give you a 'reinstall disk'... we got XP with my sister's laptop, but I'm pretty sure that I couldn't install it on my PC. And no way is it worth that kind of money. No, ME is what I have and ME is what I will have probably until I have to replace this computer.

Dual boot with our old copy of 98SE? But that'd take up a bunch of HDD space and I'd have to split it between the two... and if I was to do that I'd probably want to use 98SE for everything because ME has no advantages over it, but you can't downgrade... again, I'd need a blank 40+GB HDD to back up everything on my main partition...

Oh, and DOSBox has speed controls if that's what you tried. First get the latest version -- dosbox.sourceforge.net . Read documentation. I think it's CTRL-F11 and CTRL-F12 for increase and decrease clock cycles. Not all games work perfectly, but a lot do... oh, and for the DOS Lucasarts adventures (and some others), http://www.scummvm.com . :)

Now all we need is a DirectX5 (and below) emulator for DirectX9... I have a couple of old Win95 games (Pod and Ultim@te Race Pro for instance) that don't work in WinME (or, I'm sure, XP), and can't exactly be run in a DOS emulator... no way to play those except going to an old computer. :(

And as for those Sierra Win 3.1 games (or some others, like Interplay's Norse by Norsewest), they all have DOS versions I think. Use those. They run a lot better on a modern machine... well on mine anyway. For you you'd have to use DOSBox I guess. But I have KQ7 and the DOS one is definitely better than the Windows one.

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.

I have a DOS boot disc for my ME, but I never got sound or the CD (well DVD...) working, so it's kind of pointless...