Pentium 3 too fast for older games??

[OxygenStar]

so ive been wanting to setup a computer that is able to play games from the 90s (1990-1999) to be exact.. And Like most of you on here, i am a huge fan of kings quest, space quest, etc... freddie farkas frontier farmicist!! ha  BUT i would also like to be able to play games up to when WARCRAFT II was released... (warcraft requires, just a pentium 60, and 16 mb of ram....

but i had an older computer sitting at my house, which i hand built originally, most parts were there, some i took apart here are the stats:

Pentium 3
733 mhz
300 watt power supply
256 mb of ram
20 gb harddrive

some diamond max video card..
no sound card yet

if i put windows 95 on it, and run games spanning from kings quest 1, to warcraft II.. you think that would be a speed problem??>  since the kings quest series had way lower requirements than the warcraft II requirements... obviously

rather than building a whole other computer with less speed and ram... I just wanted to see if i could work with what i got... since all i need to buy is the case fans, and sound card (which the mt-32 interested me, im a music nerd, went to school for recording, and yes i am a keyboardist, guitarist, drummer, composer, yada yada , hehe)

what you guys think??

-carl

[OxygenStar]

on a side note, where is the cutoff where games from that era start to go too fast? with what specs?? if anyone knows...

or i could detune the p3 to slower mhz? i dont know! heh

[Marten]

A Pentium III at 733 MHz came out around late 1999.  I'm guessing it will probably work well enough for games dated 1996 and forward... maybe earlier.

As for much earlier games, well...  there are even games that won't work right on a Pentium II (such as "Sorcerian").  For such games which were designed to run at speeds like 11MHz, your best solution is to employ DosBox, which can slow these games down.

If you're trying to run a game like Thexder, you may even have to do some silly things like run "command" a few times in a row to eat up "lower" memory space; Thexder actually expects that DOS eats up a certain amount of low-address memory.

[OxygenStar]

hmm yea, but i wanna run the games real deal.. not with dosbox.. if i were to do that, id just run it on the main computers I use... pentium 4 jobbers...

[Great Hierophant]

DOSBox is a lot more convenient and flexible to run older games.  It saves on hardware too. 

[Tom]

I play a lot of these older games on a PIII 733 MHz (my main music computer) under Win98SE, but I just disable the CPU's internal cache when I play ... and they seem to run very well.  I used to have DOS 6.22 on this computer, too (a dual boot setup), but Win98's command prompt works just as well for me for old stuff.

[OxygenStar]

nice... that works for me then... !!! 

just finished installing windows98se.. found my original cd.. ha!  and kings quest 1-4 with manuals, and companions of xanth...  oh yea but i need some soundage too!!  heh

-carl

[Ari]

I play a lot of these older games on a PIII 733 MHz (my main music computer) under Win98SE, but I just disable the CPU's internal cache when I play ... and they seem to run very well.  I used to have DOS 6.22 on this computer, too (a dual boot setup), but Win98's command prompt works just as well for me for old stuff.

I used to do that with my P-II 266 MHz, but it slowed down the computer too much and made most games unplayable for me.

When DOSBox finally came out I was an extremely happy camper... 

[5u3]

If you're trying to run a game like Thexder, you may even have to do some silly things like run "command" a few times in a row to eat up "lower" memory space; Thexder actually expects that DOS eats up a certain amount of low-address memory.

There is a little PD program called "EatMem", providing a more elegant way to reduce available DOS base memory. Get it from the author's homepage here.

[OxygenStar]

good to know.. i may try that as well..

thanks!!

[Amigaz]

Games I've had speed problems with are the Ultima series up to Ultima VII, the Double Dragon games, Speedball, Wing Commander I & II.
The worst of them is Wing Commander I which runs too slow on my 386SX 16mhz and a bit too fast on my 386DX 40mhz lolol....runs perfect though on my 386DX 25mhz ....it runs in warp speed on my 486DX2 50mhz 

[BlueMax]

for speed problems, find the old DOS utility "MOSLOW"

Eat up those pesky CPU cycles!

[MusicallyInspired]

Moslow doesn't work very well, though. There are painfully noticeable skips. It's not very fluent. The only good turbo program I've seen was CPU Killer but it's only a trial program and you have to pay for more than 30 seconds of use in a game or something like that. Which is horrible.

[Ari]

DOSBox works the best with Wing Commander 1&2. I could never get it to play at the correct speed any other way.

[Amigaz]

DOSBox works the best with Wing Commander 1&2. I could never get it to play at the correct speed any other way.

If you have a 386DX 25-33mhz it runs perfect  , runs fine on my 486DX 40mhz also when ran in non turbo mode