27th September 2007, 7:54 PM
(This post was last modified: 27th September 2007, 8:20 PM by A Black Falcon.)
I know, I've talked about this before. But after some renewed efforts yesterday to get a few things working, I have to say it again... I really, REALLY miss DOS support.
"But-but-but DOSBox..."
Unfortunately, DOSBox does not run all games, and even many of the ones it does run run substantially slower than they would on a real system. Road & Track Presents: The Need for Speed? Why is it running so jerkily? Duke Nukem 3D is particularly bad: Why does it take so long to load in normal DOSBox 0.72? Why is the sound messed up sometimes (some sfx seem missing?)? Why do the graphics momentarially corrupt when you go in and out of the water? DOSBox can't handle changing color palettes well? Why does the speed seem somewhat inconsistent... TES Adventures: Redguard demo? Why does the Glide emulation in that alternate DOSBox 0.72 CVS build fail and crash the game at the loading screen? Why is its Vista fullscreen implementation broken? Why does that CVS build crash when I push a button on the gamepad... etc.
All of these are games, of course, that run perfectly on my old computer. The "Windows Vista does not support full-screen mode for this game" dialog box is evil... :(
I know that XP has serious problems with many DOS games too (getting Duke 3d to run well on XP is evidently quite hard), but Vista is even worse. At least XP supports a fullscreen mode, for the games that actually work in it or can be made to...
Oh yes, and while Tabworks technically runs in Vista, it doesn't like the new file system -- it cannot see your disc drives or display them on the sidebar and there is no click and drag support anymore -- in ME you only had to click on a file in a Windows Explorer folder and drag it into Tabworks and it'd auto-create a link to that file in Tabworks. Tabworks could also be set to auto-create tabs when things were added to the start menu. This time neither of those features work, so the only way to add new icons is to manually create them -- Tabworks CAN see the folder tree when you're going through the 'where is this icon pointing to' dialogs, at least.
In addition, Vista can't see the icons in some icon files, including all of Tabworks' icon libraries except for the default one and the icons in the exe files of some games, particularly older ones (Windows 3.1 program file icons are pretty much all "not there", as are even some icon files). Annoying.
There are a few games that I have that work better on my new computer than my old one -- Pod being the best example, given that before it didn't run at all but now it runs perfectly -- but that's a Windows 95 game, not DOS.
"But-but-but DOSBox..."
Unfortunately, DOSBox does not run all games, and even many of the ones it does run run substantially slower than they would on a real system. Road & Track Presents: The Need for Speed? Why is it running so jerkily? Duke Nukem 3D is particularly bad: Why does it take so long to load in normal DOSBox 0.72? Why is the sound messed up sometimes (some sfx seem missing?)? Why do the graphics momentarially corrupt when you go in and out of the water? DOSBox can't handle changing color palettes well? Why does the speed seem somewhat inconsistent... TES Adventures: Redguard demo? Why does the Glide emulation in that alternate DOSBox 0.72 CVS build fail and crash the game at the loading screen? Why is its Vista fullscreen implementation broken? Why does that CVS build crash when I push a button on the gamepad... etc.
All of these are games, of course, that run perfectly on my old computer. The "Windows Vista does not support full-screen mode for this game" dialog box is evil... :(
I know that XP has serious problems with many DOS games too (getting Duke 3d to run well on XP is evidently quite hard), but Vista is even worse. At least XP supports a fullscreen mode, for the games that actually work in it or can be made to...
Oh yes, and while Tabworks technically runs in Vista, it doesn't like the new file system -- it cannot see your disc drives or display them on the sidebar and there is no click and drag support anymore -- in ME you only had to click on a file in a Windows Explorer folder and drag it into Tabworks and it'd auto-create a link to that file in Tabworks. Tabworks could also be set to auto-create tabs when things were added to the start menu. This time neither of those features work, so the only way to add new icons is to manually create them -- Tabworks CAN see the folder tree when you're going through the 'where is this icon pointing to' dialogs, at least.
In addition, Vista can't see the icons in some icon files, including all of Tabworks' icon libraries except for the default one and the icons in the exe files of some games, particularly older ones (Windows 3.1 program file icons are pretty much all "not there", as are even some icon files). Annoying.
There are a few games that I have that work better on my new computer than my old one -- Pod being the best example, given that before it didn't run at all but now it runs perfectly -- but that's a Windows 95 game, not DOS.