All of my favorite games are DOS games. I wanted them again so badly that I tried for 3 straight years to get them working on my new computer. A year into this process, my old computer died, and I was unable to play my games at all. I would have begun to forget what they looked like were it not for the fact that my Mom's computer could run them.
In the end, I had to duel-boot Windows XP and DOS to be able to to get the majority of them to run. None of my sound cards were Sound-Blaster compatible, so I had to copy the DOS driver files from my Mom's 98 computer, designed for her card in 98's MS-DOS mode, and put them on my duel-booted IBM DOS 5.0. I then asked my brother (as I am pretty much hardware illiterate) to switch sound cards between my computer and my Mom's. This actually worked and gave me sound, but some of the MIDI was distorted in a few games, and I haven't found a fix for that yet. I had to create a winbootdir variable to get them to run at all as this variable was how the drivers found their INI file.
Only a few years ago, it was very easy to run DOS games. All you had to do was insert a floppy, install the program, double-click on the EXE, and you were set. It's now become progressively harder...do you think it will eventually be impossible to run DOS games? Will it eventually become impossible to find sound-blaster combatible cards? When companies stop making drivers for 98, will there still be a way to get DOS drivers for non-sound-blaster compatible cards? What will happen when the last floppy drive on the planet dies?
I would be very sad if I had to say goodbye to my DOS games forever... :sad:
