Retro gaming challenge! Windows 8 versus classic PC games

November 15, 2012

PC gaming is stronger than it has been in years, but the classic age of PC gaming has to be the mid- to late 1990s. The PC was a strong source of innovation in gaming, spawning new genres as well as the birth of real-time, online multiplayer games. That era also saw the transition from games running on DOS—with all its arcane memory-management horrors and divergent graphics APIs—to the modern era of Windows gaming. Although most of the classic titles haven't aged well, it's still fun to go back for nostalgia's sake and check out the games of yore. But is it even possible on a modern Windows 8 PC? That's what I intended to find out. Technical roadblocks Running older games can be an exercise in frustration. DOS games are particularly problematic because many of them use 16-bit memory addressing and simply won't run on modern 64-bit operating systems. But this problem isn't limited to DOS-based games, since it affects some early Windows 95 titles as well. Even somewhat newer Windows titles that ran well in the Windows 95/98 era may have problems on a modern PC. For example, some may run well once installed, but the installer itself might be 16-bit, and therefore won't run. Note that these issues aren't exclusive to Windows 8; they cropped up with Windows 7, as well. The solution, most of the time, is to grab a neat open-source emulator called DOSBox. If you want to learn the intricacies of using DOSBox to run golden-age games you may already own, check out Alex Wawro's in-depth tutorial about running old games on Windows 7. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2013991/retro-gaming-challenge-windows-8-versus-classic-pc-games.html