24th January 2006, 7:48 PM
Ah, no. GR, think... what am I talking about? DOS GAMES. What is the biggest problem with Windows XP? The fact that legacy DOS support is almost completely broken! No, if I had XP I might be able to run 1/10th of my DOS games, but as it is, I can run everything that can cope with faster CPUs than it was designed to run on. That is, the majority of DOS games, actually. Yes, a few do need DOSBox because of speed issues (or are better there), but most either are the same or run worse... (slower; Master of Magic, TES I: Arena, Betrayal at Krondor, etc, etc) No, DOS games are the #1 reason why I LIKE having Windows ME, and whenever it is that I get XP, I would like to have a seperate partition with either ME or '98 on it so that I will continue to be able to natively run DOS programs.
I really can't remember, but it looks like maybe once I actually had fixed it, and then something made the problem come back a few years ago and I couldn't remember what I'd done to fix it or something? I can't think of any other explanation for why there was that already-disabled (; before the line) line identical to the one I had to disable, just two lines above it... that IS how msconfig works, when you disable something and then something else re-enables it it doesn't recheck the old listing, it makes a new one. So maybe that's it... I hope... :D
It used to be fine, DOSBox is only a minor hassle and ran games fast enough, but some games it can't run fast enough on my system... so now TES: Arena runs either a bit too fast (native) or annoyingly slow (dosbox). Bah. At least Betrayal at Krondor's speedup doesn't negatively impact the game... :) (Ultima Underworld also has the too fast/too slow problem, actually...)
On a related note, here's a really, really odd thing: TESII: Daggerfall runs better in DOSBox than TESI: Arena. Huh?
Oh, and I said four years because I know our previous computers, before this one, had EMM memory, and I know mine hasn't for a long time, but I can't remember if I ever had it working on this one for any period of time. DOSBox made me say 'good enough', but then today I was looking at some stuff about Oblivion, and it got me to go to the Bethesda forums, and I saw a thread on 'how to make Arena work in XP', and I said 'hmm how about ME' so I did a Yahoo search for something like 'EMM memory "windows millenium" and found something that had a detailed description of the answer (a site for how to run WordPerfect for DOS in Windows, actually...). :)
Quote:And wow, I could have told you about that ABF, yes 4 years ago I knew it too. Try asking us before going on 4 years being totally stumped .
I really can't remember, but it looks like maybe once I actually had fixed it, and then something made the problem come back a few years ago and I couldn't remember what I'd done to fix it or something? I can't think of any other explanation for why there was that already-disabled (; before the line) line identical to the one I had to disable, just two lines above it... that IS how msconfig works, when you disable something and then something else re-enables it it doesn't recheck the old listing, it makes a new one. So maybe that's it... I hope... :D
Quote:And wow, I could have told you about that ABF, yes 4 years ago I knew it too. Try asking us before going on 4 years being totally stumped .
It used to be fine, DOSBox is only a minor hassle and ran games fast enough, but some games it can't run fast enough on my system... so now TES: Arena runs either a bit too fast (native) or annoyingly slow (dosbox). Bah. At least Betrayal at Krondor's speedup doesn't negatively impact the game... :) (Ultima Underworld also has the too fast/too slow problem, actually...)
On a related note, here's a really, really odd thing: TESII: Daggerfall runs better in DOSBox than TESI: Arena. Huh?
Oh, and I said four years because I know our previous computers, before this one, had EMM memory, and I know mine hasn't for a long time, but I can't remember if I ever had it working on this one for any period of time. DOSBox made me say 'good enough', but then today I was looking at some stuff about Oblivion, and it got me to go to the Bethesda forums, and I saw a thread on 'how to make Arena work in XP', and I said 'hmm how about ME' so I did a Yahoo search for something like 'EMM memory "windows millenium" and found something that had a detailed description of the answer (a site for how to run WordPerfect for DOS in Windows, actually...). :)