In the recent days, I have been fascinated by 86Box, which is a surprisingly complex PC emulator that allows you to choose which hardware it should copy from a wide range of components that really existed. This means, once you have ‘assembled’ your machine, you will also need to install the authentic drivers to get your OS working - you even may run into the same compatibility issues you would have run with the real components.
On a current high-end PC, 86Box is also capable of copying a Pentium computer with a 3D accellerator such as a Voodoo card. I would say, it almost covers the entire range of PCs from the 90s (and probably also the 80s). Just choose what you want.
For me, setting up a 386 with MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 turned out to be a purely nostalgic adventure by itself. This emulator is highly recommendable to anyone who longs for this past era of computers!
There’s also its sister of sorts, PCem. 86Box is some kind of fork which wasn’t necessarily better, or at least not in all ways, but I understand the latest v5 is probably on par in the ways it previously wasn’t and better in others. You can find premade setups for PCem (and presumably 86Box) on Archive.org, for example [here](Windows 3.11 Environment (1.2b) : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive).
I tried Tomb Raider 2 from Steam on PCem in Windows 98 with an emulated Voodoo 2 a few years ago. It felt almost like the real thing — it probably would’ve been indistinguishable with a CRT.
Incidentally, unless 86Box performance is much worse than PCem, I did that on my PC from 2015 (with 2014 hardware). A decent PC for the time with an i7-4790, but long enough in the tooth for me to have replaced it a little over a year ago. Just about any 4-core i3 (e.g., i3-12100, i3-14100) from the past couple of years should perform better for example.
I figured out that it’s very easy to get old games running on modern hardware (DOS games for example with one of the DOSBox forks). The much bigger problem is to bypass the copy protection. Steam games might be not a problem but the old CD based protections are.
With DOSBox I think there’s often a problem with the emulation speed. My own negative experience along that line was with Realms of Arkania 2: Star Trail. I haf ripped my CDs for convenience, set up DOSBox and was happily playing for a while. Then, on my way through the wilderness I probably took the wrong turn and ran into a group of Elves that threatened to kill us if the party didn’t turn around. While I was frantically searching for the controls that would allow that, the game rapidly cycled through escalating popups until after mere seconds it was game over. I would imagine whatever timer the game used between those events, it was elapsing way too fast with my setup. And of course I hadn’t saved in a while (which, granted, is always a bit of a gamble with those older games).
I would assume a hardware-level emulation like 86Box wouldn’t have this sort of issue.
Would this work if you had an actual drive (albeit a DVD-RW) with the actual CD inside? Though it’d be the same issue as with the manual or code-wheel based copy protections: that old stuff is stored away in the basement and inconvenient to dig out.
And when all it does is introducing black lines (and maybe distorting the image a bit), I’d rather be without .
That’s right, I should have mentioned PCem as well, though I only tried 86Box yet.
Yes, that’s the point. In the past, I merely used DOSBox or VirtualBox, but none of them feels equally authentic, since they have different approaches.
By the way, when I tested Tomb Raider II in VirtualBox, I could only use software rendering - no 3D accelleration, neither Glide nor OpenGL.
I can confirm this. That’s why I have been using a DOSBox Manager (D-Fend Reloaded) that allows individual DOSBox configs for each game.
Have you tried DOSBox-X too? They claim that they focus on accuracy. (I haven’t tried that fork, so I can’t tell if that’s true.)
3D support in VirtualBox was and is still a mess. Even a Windows guest isn’t able to use it to render the desktop. VMware did a better job: A few years ago I was able to run Need for Speed Porsche in VMware Workstation.
But funny enough, the recent c’t magazine has an article about DOSBox Pure Unleashed, which supposedly provides a better out-of-the-box experience than regular old DOSBox, but then it also mentions that if things are too fast or too slow, open the menu and change the cycle time.
IMHO, you miss quite a lot of joy by simply using a premade setup in 86Box, but Archive.org also turned out to be very useful for setting up my self-made setup, since it provides a large variety of old drivers. Great site!
I agree to a point. They don’t (or didn’t) have a Windows 98 with a Voodoo 2 available and I did enjoy that. But for Windows 3.11 you have to swap out six or more diskettes; it’s somewhat tedious if you just want to quickly check out Visual Basic 4.0 or something. I’ve already had that fun plenty in the past.
Yes, VMWare had been the only option that I knew for playing such old 3D games on modern hardware - aside from GOG and Archive.org (on which you still might not get anything).
Personally, I still own a couple of old computers, too, but I always had wondered what I shall do, when their components have reached their end of life - the second-hand supply might shrink and get more expensive over the next decades. Therefore I welcome every emulator that provides 3D support. The hardware requirements will continue to be a decreasing issue, as long as modern hardware performs higher and higher.
Incidentally, DOSBox, or at least DOSBox-X, also supports 3dfx and Windows 9x quite well. And I still have a Windows 3.11 install for use in DOSBox that I set up about 15 years ago.
It may also be worth mentioning that there’s a slew of Windows 3 and 9x programs and games that have run better in Wine than on real Windows for a very long time now. As a semi-random example Atlantis: The Lost Tales hasn’t had working video or proper game speed since at least Windows 8.
Oh yes, I even have tried Glide myself in DOSBox several years ago, but it was new to me that even Windows 98 runs in there. Back then, my hardware would have been too slow for it anyway, I guess.
I have tested Wine, too, somewhere in the past, but if I remember correctly, not every game worked with it. But when it comes to performance/efficiency (if you want to play a more demanding game) an emulator might not be on a par with Wine, of course.
By the way, there were some games, such as Unreal Tournament, that could even run natively in Linux. Some of them still might do.
You shouldn’t need all that much by post-2010 standards, unless you’re talking about the very tail end of 9x like Max Payne maybe. But NFS: Hot Pursuit, Interstate 76, Starcraft and the like should run on just about anything afaik. (Though you probably wouldn’t even need DOSBox for that, give or take needing a crack/GOG/Steam version.)
Most famously (in recent years) by Feral Interactive. But I think they stopped due to Proton.
