DOS Games Discussion

Hello everybody, I have some different questions I really would appreciate to get answered!
I will buy a pentium 200mhz computer to play old games on.

1. What's the best graphic card I can get? Ive read about one called matrox millenium something with 4mb vram. Is it any good or is it anyone else I should buy?

2. Vesa support is really important on the graphic card to play games like Redneck Rampage, Duke Nukem in the best resolution. Is it any card that I should be aware of which doesnt has this support?

3. Should I get an ISA soundcard or stick with pci? Ive read that ISA gives the "best" sound on old dos games but how does it work and sound with "never" games like Quake and Carmageddon 2?

4. Does anyone know the hdd size limitation for computers like this one? I will have windows 95 and saw somewhere that it had a size limitation of 30gb. Is this correct? If yes, the limitation is 30gb per drive if Im not mistaken and that means that I can use multiply of 30gb drives like 2*30gb?

5. Is there any size limitation of the startup disk on a p200 win 95?


Thx in advance

1. There's such a topic there. Read it.
2. Duke requires VESA 2.0. Card's manual tells if it supports it.
3. If it's Sound Blaster normal/Pro/16 (ASP)/32 or 100% compatible, NOT indegrated.
5. 1 floppy's enough.

1. Get a S3, Cirrus Logic, or Trident PCI card. 1 or 2 MB oughta do it.
2. Just about all PCI video cards made 1995 or later should have VESA support
3. Yes, stick with ISA sound cards.
4. The limit is 8.4 GB. If you get a bigger drive, it should still work, but you won't be able to use all of the space, just some of it.
5. Use the common 1.44 MB floppy disk. There's still a little bit of room leftover for some extra DOS utilities if you need it.

1. A kickass card that's 100% compatible with VESA (onboard, no drivers needed) and DOS games is 3dfx Voodoo 3000 (with 16MB of RAM). It's definitely an overkill for DOS games, since DOS games won't be able to utilize the 3dfx features, but if you can't find an older card that this, it's excellent. And if you are gonna put Win95 on the PC and play some Windows games, like GTA, Blood 2, you'll DEFINITELY notice the difference. Mobos for Pentium PCs may not feature AGP slots, but there are PCI versions of that card as well.

2. With the aforementioned Voodoo, you should have no problems. However, the CPU may bottleneck a bit, I'm not sure. I played all the 3D games you mentioned with the Voodoo perfectly, but my machine was a bit more powerful than the P200 - K6 @475MHz. A 1MB card will probably choke on high resolutions.

3. ISA card DEFINITELY. PCI cards sometimes don't provide backwards compatibility, even if they should according to specs. My suggestion - one of the original Creative ISA Plug-n-Play cards, like SB16, AWE32 or AWE64. Compatible with every DOS game out there, compatible with Windows, and while they don't sound as good as today's cards and don't provide surround effects, all these things would be virtually useless anyway on such an old machine. Well, maybe if you play Half-Life...

4. Not sure about the limit of the BIOS, it might depend on the motherboard. DOS 6 limits to 8.4GB. Windows 95 may go a bit over that limit, I'm not sure. Windows 98 has no such limit, but remember that FAT16 partitions are still limited to 2GB each. Of course, with Win98 you can use FAT32 (DOS games wouldn't mind, I presume) and have partitions as big as you want. I'm just not sure you need it, because how much space can old games take?

In general: if you can, forget Win95. If you're gonna play DOS games strictly - make it MS-DOS 6.22, format your hard disk to 4 FAT16 partitions of 2GB each, and have fun. If you want to utilize Windows too, try Win98SE. It's more stable and supports FAT32 and larger partition. However, if you go with Win98, I still suggest that your boot partition (C:) is FAT16, just in case some really nasty DOS games don't handle FAT32 well (I've seen that happen with one game at least - Lemmings 2). Note that Windows itself doesn't have to be installed on C:, just the boot files.

Tseng Et-6000 based video cards (PCI) are VESA 2 compliant and very fast. The PCI version of the Nvidia Riva128 has VESA 3 in bios and is also very fast in DOS.

Earlier DOS games like Tseng et-4000 based ISA/VLB cards the most

Thanks everybody for all the answers. This made me alot wiser!
A Voodoo 3 card sound great, I just thougt that a card with 16mb memory would be to fast for many of the oldest dos games but it seems Im wrong!

Okey, then I will get an ISA soundcard. Is there any big difference from Awe32 and Awe64? Sound to me that Awe64 is a never and (better?) soundcard. Is there any visible difference in sound quality?

Ive searched arround alot arround the net regarding hdd barrier in windows 95 and found out that windows 95 officially supports disks up to 30gb. The problem is the motherboard which sometimes has a limitation on 8,4gb. But that can recording to Western Digital and other harddrive manufacters be resolved downloading one of their programs which should write some extra stuff into bios which allows it to see 30gb discs!

The reason why I want to have a big disc on arround 20gb is that I have spent alot of time finding old games which will work on my p200 and it takes space, believe me, (16gb!) But that includes alot of image files on games like c&c, duke3d, blood 2 and many more!
Ive though about burning them all on cdr's but it would take up so many cds that a harddrive would be so much more simple!

Yea, iknow that win98se is much more stable but I see no reason why windows 95 osr 2.5 should make difficulties. And if so I change operating system when it's needed! Win98 takes up more memory than win95 and the startup screen of windows 95 is nicer haha!

Dammit I forgot to log in! : )

In AWE it's only a music quality. I don't know any DOS game supportin' it directly. Because Windows I recomment 16.

To answer some of your questions:

For DOS games, there will be no difference between AWE32 and AWE64. Like 486 player said, it's mostly a difference in the MIDI soundfonts and such.

I don't know of any DOS games that support AWE64 directly (even if there are, they are few), and not all DOS games even support AWE32. If a game supports AWE, you may be able to get good sound and good music. If not - you'll get standard SB16 quality, which is still very good for DOS games.

I think most Pentium mobos don't have the 8.4GB limitation. It's a limitation of DOS 6.

You are right that Win98 eats up more resources than Win95. You may get along just fine with 95 as well. From what you're planning to use the PC for it sounds like you won't be abusing it too much, so it shouldn't give you problems.

Anonymous wrote:Thanks everybody for all the answers. This made me alot wiser!
A Voodoo 3 card sound great, I just thougt that a card with 16mb memory would be to fast for many of the oldest dos games but it seems Im wrong!

Okey, then I will get an ISA soundcard. Is there any big difference from Awe32 and Awe64? Sound to me that Awe64 is a never and (better?) soundcard. Is there any visible difference in sound quality?

Ive searched arround alot arround the net regarding hdd barrier in windows 95 and found out that windows 95 officially supports disks up to 30gb. The problem is the motherboard which sometimes has a limitation on 8,4gb. But that can recording to Western Digital and other harddrive manufacters be resolved downloading one of their programs which should write some extra stuff into bios which allows it to see 30gb discs!

The reason why I want to have a big disc on arround 20gb is that I have spent alot of time finding old games which will work on my p200 and it takes space, believe me, (16gb!) But that includes alot of image files on games like c&c, duke3d, blood 2 and many more!
Ive though about burning them all on cdr's but it would take up so many cds that a harddrive would be so much more simple!

Yea, iknow that win98se is much more stable but I see no reason why windows 95 osr 2.5 should make difficulties. And if so I change operating system when it's needed! Win98 takes up more memory than win95 and the startup screen of windows 95 is nicer haha!

That is the same stuff i have in a computer in my room

I wonder why no one consider the cluster size ,considering the HD Torment wants to mount.
In FAT16 on a large partition (1024-2047Mb) it is 32Kb,
When you use FAT32 and format your partition with a third partition manager you can set the cluster size even on a 20Gb partition to 8Kb.
Try to see what differance that makes for a game like gods:
on a Fat32 partition (cluster 8Kb)it is a 0,99Mb (1.040.615bytes),and uses 1,32Mb(1.392.640bytes)disk space for 141 files in 1 folder.
That's about 30% diskspace wasted,i don't know howmany diskspace there would be wasted on a large Fat16 partition,it's gonna be huge.
Considering that win95 doesn't support FAT32,i would go for win98,or even a dualboot msdos/win98.
If you mount a 20G disk on win95 you would be having a lot's partition to keep your cluster waste from going huge.
Also consider the restriction on FAT16 to 65.000 entry's,with a partition filled with old dos games i consider that it can be reach.FAT32 has no entry restriction.
pffffffffff now i'm gonna take a beer......

Everything you said here is correct, although my experience showed that it's not a crucial point (the wasted space). An 8GB disk even partitioned to 4 2GB partitions (64K cluster size - ouch!) should still suffice for an incredible amount of DOS games. More than you'll play anyway. And what you don't play - you can ZIP, and then it wastes no space, cause it's a single file.

yes ,right all the way,except:
Torment wants to use at least a 20Gb disk ,and talks about 16G space use.
I think that guy owns a HUGE collection.I think i gonna rob him,yes!

In which case FAT32 is the ONLY way to go, because of the simple 2GB partition limitation of FAT16. However, if you look back, we were discussing Win95OSR2 which does support FAT32. In any case, we've been through it once already.

For video in my dos box i got a Miro 20SD (a graphic card based on S3 Vision 864) with 2 mb ram. This is a good card and i haven't found a single game that doesn't support it (Including 7th guest).

For sound i have a really old Sound Blaster 16, ISA, with jumpers etc. It also has a wavetable connector. I found a old Yamaha DB-50-XG daughter card. It's a must have for games with good midi music (and a lot of games have great midi music). The wavetable of the AWE32 / 64 is dissapointing. I had a SuperWave 32 card (for music, midi) and a Sound Blaster Pro /2 first, but they both died :-(

- DokZero5