Old games under DOS

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    • #23741 Reply
      Unknown,Unknown
      Participant

      So, I just bought a cheap 486 laptop to use for doing homework and – naturally – playing my old Sierra games. I got fed up with trying to make everything work under XP, had a bunch of discs, and kind of missed fooling around with DOS. (Oh, and I’m going to try running a telnet BBS eventually.)
      Anyway, here’s my question for anyone else who might have seen this problem. I’m using an NEC V/75. I have a utility to stretch the screen in DOS, but when I start a Sierra game it shrinks. The game only takes up about 3/4 of the screen (top to bottom, across if fine). Does this sound like a hardware problem I’ll just have to deal with, or is there maybe a utility I can download somewhere? Thanks in advance!
      Joshua

    • #23742 Reply
      Unknown,Unknown
      Participant

      (re: Old games under DOS) did you get any answers to your question? i just got back from vacation and am still getting the hang of this new interface…
      i read recently that you could edit a line in one of the DOS files to get your game to run fullscreen. i can’t remember now where i saw that. i was poking around the sierra bulletin boards to get info about Lost in Time, so there’s a good chance i saw this info on one of their “classic games” boards.
      -emily

    • #23743 Reply
      Unknown,Unknown
      Participant

      (re: Old games under DOS)

      sounds very familiar – in my friend’s laptop, whenever you load ANY dos application (raging from Borland C++ 3.0 to dos games like Red Alert 1) it shrinks to about 3/4 of the screen, without any apparant reason. He tried to solve it but gave up in the end, probobly a hardware thing… (in any case, try to search your BIOS menu)

    • #23744 Reply
      Unknown,Unknown
      Participant

      (re: Old games under DOS) Emily & Qfgs,
      Thanks for the replies. I’ll look for that line of code, but I don’t think there’s any hope. Unfortunately, it is a BIOS problem that there doesn’t seem to be a permanent fix for. I guess I’ll just have to get used to 3/4 game screens. No big deal, at least I don’t have to hassle with Windows to play them. 🙂
      Aside from that issue, picking up a $50 laptop for gaming, word processing, and tinkering with my old BBS was a great investment. Anyone having trouble running games in Windows should consider it!
      Joshua.

    • #23745 Reply
      Unknown,Unknown
      Participant

      (re: re: Old games under DOS) Hi there
      I also had the problem with the Full Screen until I downloaded the frontend for Dosbox (Dosboxfro). Have a look at:
      Link: http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/download.php?main=1(http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/download.php?main=1) 

      What is nice about this is that you can have multiple game setups and then just select the one you want to start. I got KQ V working with CD-ROM and speech in full screen so I am pretty impressed.
      Michael

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