Any such thing as a universal emu for old PC games?

  • Thread starter Tyger
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Tyger

Tyger

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ReTyger
All I am aware of is DOSBox (fine, albeit fiddly and for DOS-based games only) and various fixes/patches that are game-specific and either REALLY fiddly or not guaranteed to work.

Strikes me as strange that there is no such thing as a universal emulator which will play games for any older version of Windows.

And I KNOW there are major differences between the various versions of Windows over the years but it seems to me if a PC can emulate an N64 or PS2 or whatever else relatively smoothly, it should be able to emulate an older PC too.

The games I want to play particularly are (don't laugh) oldish games from the Myst series, I find point & click games kinda nice to chill with and I loved Myst, but when I got RealMyst off eBay a while back no fix or workaround would get it running and I gave up. Ridiculous really.
 
Your closest bet would be to install VirtualBox, install an older Windows OS, and then install your games onto that.

I honestly don't know anything that could run old PC games, besides virtual machines or an old Windows machine.
 
I'd say your best best is buying them again on Steam or Good Old Games. The latter is DRM free but the selection is somewhat limited, I'm sure they have Myst and Riven at the very least. Steam has the lot including RealMyst but excluding either Myst III or IV, possibly both... Myst V is on there for sure though.
 
I have some products off GOG.com (Good Old Games) and I was very surprised that it all ran very smoothly on my Windows 7 hardware and software. I even had a game on CD that refused to install for whatever obscure reason and just brought one off GOG. It worked, straight out of the box.

The gameplay of that game is hammering me though. Damn, forgotten how hardcore they can be!
 
Yeah, GOG is great, I've bought Descent 1-3, Shogo: Mobile Armo(u)r Division, Freespace 1 & 2 and Syndicate (which is from 1992, let's not forget) and they all work fine. Some of the games are just DOSBoxed, though, but the point is they all work on modern systems. I bought Fallout 1 & 2 from Steam and they weren't quite so easy to get working, no idea about the GOG version but I'm willing to bet it worked at least a little better. It's cool that they're getting some newer games in now, too.

Myst is awesome, I've only ever played the first, I have no idea why I haven't picked up some of the others yet. Then again when I played the first recently (on my phone, which was just hilarious when I think about how slow it was on my huge old Macintosh Performa) it was more like setting up a new TV than playing a game as I was just reading a walkthrough and doing exactly what it said because it was so damn hard.
 
Use dosbox, install windows 95 or 98se and have some fun. Or just use VMware workstation with any windows version. Another option is to dual boot with an older Windows install. One issue though and I don't know if there is workaround, but on 64bit CPU machines you can't run anything below Windows XP (ME, 98se, 98, 95).

Also a virtual machine like VMware is already an emulator. Due notice the world virtual, thus implying emulated. ;)
Besides things were harder in the DOS days to get stuff working. Be very glad there is Plug&Play these days, IRQ allocations and blah. Fun!
 
Thanks for all the suggestions. I will check Steam and such, although I hope the games are *very* inexpensive as a lot of the games I want to try are more out of curiosity and my pennies would probably ultimately still be better spent on things from the PS Store (although not PS or PS2 games as this illustrates my point - no way they should cost £4/£8)

Nice leads regarding Myst though, actually I have Riven for the PS1 and the old PS mouse and that works just fine, I have Myst too but I liked the idea of RealMyst. Then will probs pick up the later ones.
 
There is a version of Theme Hospital (point and clicker management sim) floating around that's been 'adjusted' to work with Windows 7, The UI is really smooth looking and so may have had the image files upgraded. That may float your boat.
 
Got most of my old games running on Win7.
Needs some fiddling around though.

VM or a second OS boot will solve the problem
And Win8.
It's the only feature about Win8 I like : installer 16 bit support.

But that also works on Win7 with a few tweaks
 

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