Amazing… I want to get an older PC for a project like this so bad. I think I’d shoot for the win98 era and get a PII or PIII so I could play 96-2000 era games.
Looks fun man, I’m jealous!
Awesome work! And hearing “Moslow” is a blast from the past.
Your post may just send me down one…
Looks great! I have a couple of old laptops I need to do an IDE to SD conversion on. Getting ready to play some Ultima?
Yep, Ultima is top on the list, how did you know? 
I’ve also been trying to get a number of my games from GOG to run in pure DOS but with only various amounts of success. Some games are straightforward, but others appeared modified to make it a little harder. Dungeon Keeper and Stonekeep are giving me problems for example. I’m thinking the CD based games are most likely the factor.
I have the CD for Stonekeep if you need me to make an ISO for you.
I was planning on installing Ultima Underworld this weekend and seeing how well it holds up.
I went back to Ultima Underworld around ten years ago. It looked ancient by then but I still loved playing through it. Once you get over the clunky nature of the old interface, there’s still an excellent game in there. The sequel was glitchier for me. I hit some bug and wasn’t able to proceed.
Ultima Underworld is still one of my favourite games. Once you get a bit farther and the game really opens up, it’s so exciting. I remember being amazed when I found the magical Taper that didn’t run out. I played that game so much with my dad growing up, that and Elder Scrolls Arena.
Fun fact, Ultima Underworld is actually the first game I played on DosBOX. I had tried playing a few things before, but they all ran like garbage. Then I got a new laptop for school, and suddenly DosBOX was working great on it. This would’ve been around 13 years ago now…
Ultima Underworld is especially amazing when you consider how far ahead of its time it was. The environment was 3d and totally immersive. It came out in early 1992, years before TES:Arena and even ahead of Wolf3D I think. It was some seriously cutting edge shit that blew my mind at the time. Our modern 3D RPGs owe a lot to Ultima Underworld blazing the trail for them.
Yes, Ultima Underworld came out before Wolfenstein 3D, which makes it about 30x more impressive. Although it required an insanely beefy machine a the time to run, and Wolf3D could run on a 286.
I actually have a windows 98 pc from about 99 that it would be fun to go down a rabbit hole like with. Really cool project for sure!
Can you still play Diablo 1 online with others? Say via IP address, or through LAN?
battle.net still kinda works. The chat and the games listings are disabled but you can still create games, and I believe join them if you know the name/password (haven’t tried that myself).
Anyone have some resources on old laptop models, like a list of model names and specs? I’m on the hunt for one with a 640x480 screen and built in sound card. Probably needs to be a Pentium processor but maybe a late model 486 would have the right specs. I’ve got a Compaq model picked out, but having trouble finding any lists for Dell, IBM, or Sony.
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games in gog dont have option of native resolution?
Depends on the game. Native resolution is meaningless for many of these old games that were meant to be played on a CRT, which had a variable resolution not a fixed resolution.
Yeah. Resolution in the old days was either 320x200 or 640x480 for the longest time. As power ramped up, you started getting to 1024x768 and that was about the time 3D acceleration became a thing.
I loved that era of PC gaming. Be happy you don’t need QEMM or have to manually manage that 640k anymore!!
Had a “fun” issue crop up when I was streaming “Ringworld: Revenge of the Patriarch” yesterday. I was using DosBox, and the game hard locked when I triggered an event. I had been running the game with cycles equivalent to a 486, and I figured maybe I was coming across a bug related to the CPU timing. Sure enough, reducing the cycles to the equivalent of a 386 allowed me to continue.
Not sure if it was a random glitch or an actual timing bug in the game, I didn’t do much troubleshooting since I was streaming live, but I thought it was a fun happenstance that I was able to get past and maybe made my stream more interesting, hah.
Not sure about Ringworld specifically but there’s a long list of CPU speed sensitive games on to vogons wiki.
Interesting yet obvious explanation of why badass big box pc games died off from the source itself.
And man… That header image is my childhood /teen years in a nutshell