Here you’ll find information on how to keep those old games chugging away on your modern systems.

Unless otherwise stated, information provided is mostly gathered from the Internet so please respect those who put the time in to help you. You can visit my message board should you need to ask any questions about anything found on this site.

Doom, Doom2, Final Doom

This goes back some years! Late in 1993 when I was equipped with just a 14.4Kbps modem and some US dial-up numbers, I downloaded the best game to be released on the PC - Doom. There’s nothing I can say that isn’t already known about this game. Suffice to say, things have moved on and Doom no longer looks or feels scary - that is if you don’t include the blocky graphics

The source code to Doom was released by iD some years back and my preferred Win32 port of it is jDoom (no, it’s not written in Java!).

Check out the jDoom site.

Duke Nukem 3D

The games world changed dramatically when iD released Quake to the world - but there was still one game that wouldn’t let a 2D engine let it fall by the wayside. Just like iD, 3D Realms were little known in the commercial game market having spent many years delivering excellent quality games through Shareware.

Unfortunately for Duke, 3D Realms weren’t as keen to let the source code go wild and it took until April 1st 2003 before it did. Why was this, who could say. Would it matter, yep it made a very real difference in the amount of interest in it. Does it really matter, maybe not but it was certainly not the greatest of decisions!

Duke3D, based on Build, had many issues on new systems. It was notoriously difficult to get working so the prospect of fully compatible Win32 ports was certainly something to look forward to! JonoF came up with the goods and his port, JFDuke, was voted best Win32 port of Duke 2003.

Several significant enhancements followed: OpenGL rendering and true colour texture support. The main item that everyone is crying out for is networking which has been recently addressed. The author has since been busy with Shadow Warrior so expect the Duke 3D progress to slow a fair bit.

Check out JonoF’s port.
Also check out JonoF’s port of Shadow Warrior.

Adventure Games - Lucasarts, Revolution

For those of the required age, i.e. like me, who enjoyed years of excellent quality adventure games from Lucasarts, you’ll be pleased to know that it’s simplicity to get these running on Windows 2000/XP systems. Greatest respect to the developers of ScummVM which has now turned into the one of the must haves for retro adventure gamers. Supported games now include:

• Lucasarts adventures: pretty much every one released
• Revolution Software: Broken Sword I & II, Beneath a Steel Sky
• Flight of the Amazon Queen
• Humongous Games: (children’s adventure games), solid ongoing development
• Coktel Vision’s Gobliiins
• Westwood Studios: Legend of Kyrandia
• AGI support has been added with the integration of Sarien
• Also many others have been added in the past year!

Check out the ScummVM site.

VDMSound

Most old games run perfectly well in a Command Prompt, but lack sound - as direct access to hardware is not allowed in NT based operating systems. VDMSound is the development of a virtual soundcard for these games.

After installation (using the latest release) a shell extension is added to facilitate easy configuration of the game’s soundcard settings. Works well, very well indeed!

Development of this utility stopped some time back and will not be picked up (by the original author) again. The source is available via Sourceforge if you *really* need to add something but it’s unlikely. Microsoft have also removed 16bit application support from Windows XP64 so over the next year or so utilities like this will become obsolete. DOSBox is your best bet but you’ll need a powerful setup to make the most out of it.

Check out the VDMSound site.

DOSBox

Lots of projects are technically impressive and this one is up there with the best. The concept behind DOSBox is to emulate an entire PC - simple eh?! Well, if you’ve got the hardware, it works and works very well indeed!

Only drawback this item is the hardware requirements are very steep - something like a 2Ghz Athlon system to get games running with anything like the speed of the original is required. If you limit your usage of DOSBox to play some old adventures, DOSBox will be fine but any significant screen animation will make the speed plummet.

Check out the DOSBox site.

Adventure Games - Sierra SCI

A leap into the future… well hi resolution graphics and quality sound was the promise of the SCI engine from Sierra. Sure enough, within time the SCI engine provided this and more far outlasting the time AGI (or perhaps any other game engine) had done before.

Simply speaking there were huge differences in the many different versions of the SCI engine thus emulation of all of them is far from available. FreeSCI supports some but this project is perhaps the slowest thing on the planet!

Most of the SCI titles run under a Command Prompt using tools like VDMSound or even under DOSBox. However, there are some instances where the game uses [now-]‘invalid’ logic to determine animation speeds… modern systems are clocked significantly higher than the developers would have had access to and so the problems didn’t show until years later. Sierra supplied some utils within their Collectors Edition boxsets but there are now better ways to deal with the issues. Hop over to the NewRisingSun’s page and download the appropriate fixes.

Check out the FreeSCI site.