Hacker News Reader

Why do you do this? What software requires it?

I actually did this just a few weeks ago. I was hunting for a shareware card game from 25 years ago. The installer was buried in a shareware DVD image; I could tear out the installer but of course couldn't run it.

W98+DosBox-X did the job. With a sufficiently powerful machine, the phony system was at least as speedy as machines of the era. And there are enough tweaks to speed up the boring parts. That one worked so well, I tried some demos from that time frame, and most did fine.

Once you set the dynamic core, it runs many times faster than PCEM and 86BOX or whatever is called today.

Some old software doesn’t play nicely on NT based Windows, notably old games tend to be finicky.

Other than that, why not? It’s interesting to see how things used to be…

Windows 2000 will run 2D games/stuff fine:

Start->Run

regsrv32 %systemroot%\apppatch\slayerui.dll

This enabled the Windows 95/98 compatibility options for desktop shortcuts a la XP. Just set them with the right mouse button and they will run fine.

On DOSBox-X, once w98se it's installed, the dynamic core will run it much faster.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com