Infomyth

Virtual PC

Installing and Running Games

Now that you've got a good install, the fun can begin! You can install DOS programs either directly from floppies or the CDROM drive, or you can make ISO images of files and Capture them and install from your virtual machine's 'D' drive.

The only tricky part may be the sound card. Here is the sound setup utility for "Masters of Orion" and its soundcard setup:

Follow the setup values in the autoexec.bat to help you:

SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 T6

This line means that your virtual machine is set to use Port 220, IRQ 5 and DMA channels 1 and 5. You choose a sound card as close to the Soundblaster 16 as possible; this could be the Soundblaster 16, the Soundblaster Pro or the original Soundblaster.

And make sure you have enough "low" or "conventional" and "extended" memory. Many games will have a low memory requirement, you can find out how much your DOS virtual machine has by typing "mem" in later versions of DOS:

See the DOS install page on this website for information on how to clean up DOS memory if you need to, or just run memmaker from the command line if you have a recent version of DOS.

Let the Games Begin!

Running games with Virtual PC is a snap. Remember that you have the option to go full screen, although it is sort of cool playing a lot of these old games in a window, particularly if they are 640x480 VGA games.

Virtual PC also lets you doing something amazingly cool: instead of saving your game, and then closing down your DOS session, you can simply close the virtual machine and select "Save State". This will restore your virtual machine to exactly the same point is was at before -- even in the middle of your game.

The only other tip is to play with your performance options to get settings that work well for you. The video hardware is emulated, and very likely to be a problem for graphics intensive games. I have found Virtual PC to work well enough for most games I've tried.

Generally, however, the problem will be that your DOS game runs way too fast, and you may need a utility like MOSLO or download the free program SLOWDOWN. Note that SLOWDOWN is free, but may not work with all memory managers. I got my version of MOSLO from "nostalgiaware" package of DOS RPG games.

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