From what I read about Copy ][ PC, all drives could read the data on the floppies, but you needed the hardware option to be able to write them. That means that you could dump a 1:1 floppy image, though you wouldn't be able to write it, but a proper mounting tool would be able to report the correct data. Unsure what trickery would be needed for the fuzzy bits, but image dumping should be viable even without the hardware option. After all, if the drive couldn't read the floppy, the protection wouldn't work (unless the not readable was part of it).

Source for that? Or is it a case like Interstate '76 timing using the computer's CPU speed directly, thus leading to all sort of problems with the hardware, thus atrocious programming done to save a bit of speed?

It doesn't. To include a Roland MT-32 emulator, you'd need the fonts, and those are copyrighted.

You have 2 ways of playing midi music. Method one is sending the midi notes to the sound card, and letting the sound card's font translate the notes to sounds. If the font isn't the correct one, you get effects like horns instead of footsteps, and cymbals instead of falling rocks. Method two is sending the midi notes to a software passthrough like VirtualMIDISynth which can use multiple sound fonts, and it sends the results to the soundtrack as sounds to play. So you can use your Roland sound font with any sound card instead of using the sound card's own fonts.

But why keep the desktop shortcut if you don't need it? The icon will still be in the installation directory, and you will have a shortcut in the start menu if you need it. Not to mention that instead of putting the desktop shortcut to a folder, you can just delete it and use whatever works for you.

So if the install couldn't write to the floppy, it wouldn't install the game at all?

Again, I never had a disk for it. Not sure if the game was already cracked on my computer, but I didn't have a disk for it, yet the game played just fine. So no floppy, just files on the HDD.

And No, you won't miss those protection screens. They can always null the response so entering 0 will bypass needing to enter the correct code and still see the protection screen sequence. But honestly, removing it makes tings altogether easier. I always backup the original file just in case I want to revisit that annoying screen. They could make a folder called orig and store it there or call the original monkey1.exe monkey1.org.

Hmm what the... Wing Ding font..? Who messed with my computer? Reengaging T2 font. Ahh, that's more like it.

I'll be back.

as a guy whose first OS was DOS version 6.0(with Win 3.1), i fucking hate dos. too many limitations. pre-internet days means if you have some hardware that didn't come with a device driver or the disks got corrupted, you're screwed. you could only really use old anti-virus software and not get the most recent updates easily. although i guess virus infections were less rampant without the internet. first internet file i ever got from a classmate (which were suppose to be just a JPEG file of wood textures) bricked my uncle's intel 486 machine. getting Ultima VII to work was annoying for already well-known reasons.... the list of annoyances goes on. anyone who wants the "original" DOS experience is either an idiot or love torturing themselves. i mean ,who hurt you, man?

Win 3.1 was just an overglorified GUI for DOS, and i could get 1 good game to run in it. Warcraft 1.

Win 95 , i have mixed feeling for. it was slow and buggy but it solved many ancient problems with dos. also some reknown(sp?) games can only work with win95.

Win 98, i had many fond memories of, and i wished my brother's friend didn't lose my copy of it. asshole. basically everything on it was plug 'n' play, and highly customisable in terms of looks anyway. also you probably need it to run Mechwarrior 3.

WinXP was just a bloated version of Win 2000 to me... but it got better and most of the bloat can be turned off or uninstalled anyways. i would install it on my toaster if my Win7 ever gets corrupted enough for me to reformat the whole damn disk. though i would still prefer a win7 install because hardware/OEM recommendations. XP can do duo-cores, but the diskspace and filesize limitation is a big turn-off.

Curious, do you use such archaic hardware for general use? Or just nostalgic gaming?

Ahh... yeah I remember. Heartfelt moment. Didn't Woodstock start flying around in circles after all happy?

yes that. although some people and their lawyers have many times tried to take them down for "piracy". and i think some of the less enlightened users here think the same way as those lawyers.
i got a feeling he's one of those damn hipsters artificially pumping up retro game prices. or he actually thinks we play games to be ironic or edgey.
He should go pester archive.org, abandonia, guys who used to run HOTU, emulator devs, ROM dumpers, etc etc etc...

I think these multiquotes for some reason when I try adding my comments in between messes it up to where you can't post a message. :)

Reply to JMich:

The CopyIIPC software does copy only disk to disk meaning source to target and floppy drive to floppy drive. There was a special 3rd party program that intercepted it and diverted the target destination to a filename. I remember using it before but typically it was just disk to disk. The other issue was that CopyIIPC and the CopyIIPC Option Board only worked on a slow computer. I believe the 486 was the threshold. Maybe 33 MHz was the limit. If you tried it on too fast a system like a Pentium you would get a Divide Overflow error. I haven't tried this under DOSBOX. So this might be worth trying to see if DOSBOX supports CopyIIPC.

This link delves into more about that Sound Blaster ISA vs PCI MIDI issue. Sound effects for me never had any problems. The MIDI was the only culprit. All I know is it never sounded the same and if recorded both versions you could tell. That was one reason why it was important for me to hold onto ISA motherboards as long as possible.

http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=34235

"It doesn't. To include a Roland MT-32 emulator, you'd need the fonts, and those are copyrighted. "

Are you referring to the MUNT? And the fonts you speak of is just the MT-32 ROM installed that accesses this font in MUNT or is there an actual sampling of all the Roland MT-32 sound fonts recorded?

If I decide to access all the DOSBOX GOG icons it will be all in one folder which I can call GOGGAMES on my desktop. I click into it and can sort the games by name or just look at the icons and click it to launch or just a keyboard to select the one i want and hit enter. Having it just in the programs folder means I would have to hunt around for the correct one. I also keep my Windows XP in Classic Mode so I don't like the standard XP interface. The 98SE interface classic look is what I prefer. I also enjoy the Quicklaunch so if it is something I frequently access it is just one click. No need to click Start and see if it is there. Quicklaunch is superior to the the Pinning of Windows 7. I also like the Clear Desktop Icon on the Quick Launch area instead of the bottom right.

Altered Beast is self runnable floppy meaning you can run the game straight off the floppy disk. It is not a requirement to install to the hard drive. But when you got to a certain point in the game you did have to insert the second disk to continue. The second disk might have been copy protection free. It's usually the first disk that was copy protected. I was just stating some programs allowed only a one time hard drive install and would even run off the hard drive without the original floppy disk present. It installed some sort of token key on the hard drive. What that key is I don't know. I think I even tried copying the files off the hard drive onto another floppy and the that floppy would not work always asking to insert the original Altered Beast disk 1. I wasn't a hardcore hacker to understand what it wrote but I know something was written to the hard drive that the program knew where to look before it allowed you into the game.

I guess you could think of it like this. If you are attending a special convention you pay for your entrance fee and they give you a wrist band. Now you can enter the doors watched by an attendant checking to make sure you have a wrist band on. Once you've entered you have the ability to watch the show and you can step out and use the toilet but not need to show the wrist band when you exit. Usually the wrist bands are locked down pretty snug around your wrists to prevent tampering. Let's say this wrist band was a bit loose so you could squeeze your wrist out of it and hand it to your friend who has a smaller wrist than you and wears it. Your friend walks by the wrist band attendant and goes through. Your friend is like the hard drive. You can't enter into the showroom because you no longer have the wrist band. Come to think of it I can't remember once you've transferred the copy protection token off the floppy disk to the hard drive did you lose access on the floppy disk. Anyhow, let's say you can only run it from the hard drive until you release the copy protection token back onto the floppy disk. That's the same as your friend returning you the wrist band and now you can watch the show again.

Oh if Ancient Art of War was running on the hard drive that's totally different. It was cracked in that case and you didn't have the original disk so that's most likely the case. Most games from Broderbund were copy protected and this was one of them. If it was installable on the hard drive I think it would still do an insert original disk 1 pre-check before entering the game. I remember with CopyiiPc you could also use nokey.com to circumvent the copy protection and it might be possible to copy all those files and nokey.com onto the hard drive and run it without the original disk. But since you have no recollection of how it got installed on the hard drive in the first place there's no way to know for certain. Also, later versions of CopyIIPC actually cracked the game rather than use a circumventing TSR file which did use a little of your conventional memory. Also on modern day computers it would run way too fast but if you tweak the dosbox.conf cpu cycles you could probably slow it down enough to where it operates normally without the divide overflow error message or freeze.

Reply to dick1982:

Dos 6.0 was fine. Come to think of it Dos 5.0 used less conventional memory than Dos 6.0 and was a better choice. I think Dos 6.22 might have been able to recover that glory status of lost conventional memory and was on par with Dos 5.0. So if you had used Dos 5.0 or 6.22 you would have probably have less conventional memory taken up by DOS. As far as Warcraft 1 compatibility issues it was the Windows 3.1 that probably killed you. Windows 3.1 needed drivers for everything because it was its own operating system running on top of DOS. So you would need the display driver, sound driver, network driver, mouse driver, modem driver maybe too? It's been awhile.

But you can always shutdown / quit to real DOS from Windows 3.1. DOS didn't need any special drivers for video or audio as long as it was supported by the game. Some games were pretty advanced and allowed you to play digitized speech and sound effects off a real internal PC speaker no sound card! Some notable games that did this was Star Control 1 intro, Star control 2 had awesome music but they were based on mod files and not midi. Now Mean Streets and Crime Wave those were two VGA 256 color games with digitized graphics and sound all rolled into one. No sound card needed and it didn't support any either at the time.

For Virus scanning it was McAfee VirusScan and you had to basically put the entire computer on hold and scan the entire hard drive and possibly each floppy if it wasn't write protected it got infected. But people hardly got infected back then compared to today. You had to be sharing files with someone in order to get something and run something. Most people did scan their disks or files before running but not all viruses were known back then.

You are right that Windows 3.1 is an overglorified GUI that ran on top of DOS but it was the start of something trying to get simple people to use a computer who couldn't understand how to use the command line. I actually wished in some ways Windows didn't get invented because it was nice having the power to use a computer and you could get paid pretty well knowing your craft. Today any kid can hop on and use a computer including grandma. It was new and different. In fact I believe you might be able to run Windows 3.1 even on a modern computer whereas you can't run Windows 95/98.

But as far as Warcraft 1 Orcs and Humans. That never should be run except in real DOS. I wouldn't even have attempted to run it inside Windows 3.1 because you might not get any sound or have a conflict. If you had a Sound Blaster with a VGA graphics card and a Microsoft Serial Mouse and Microsoft Mouse driver loaded the game would work in DOS. If you tried to run it inside Windows 3.1 if it did work it would be very slow.

Renown you mean like well known or famous games? Yeah, maybe there are a few but the only one that immersed me was Bladerunner. I can't think of too many Windows 95 games that blew me away. Mostly the DOS games were the ones that really were impressive. I think maybe games written during the 98SE / Windows 2000 era started to get pretty good. I like the Star Trek Voyager Elite Force 1 game and it runs perfectly on 98SE / 2000 / XP.

I didn't get a chance to play Mechwarrior 3 but Mechwarrior 1 yes.

What disk space limitation are you referring to in XP? Are you talking about FAT32 file size limitations at 4GB? You can format a NTFS 2TB USB external hard as a single FAT32 2TB partition. I have done it using 3rd party partitioning software. The FAT32 file size limitation is an issue for me as well only because I do a lot of HDTV DVR recording and files over 30 minutes starts creeping close to 4GB you have to stop the recording during a commercial or risk the recording stop at 4GB and cut off the rest of the show. So either do what I do or convert the entire partition to NTFS and you can record probably a 2TB file size and fill it up completely. I haven't tried recording a HDTV video file that large but I'm sure it is possible. Usually a 2TB formatting USB hard drive shows up as 1.81TB so you do lose some space from the file system formatting.

XP can use FAT16, FAT32, and NTFS file format also which is the same as Windows 7. I can access 2TB NTFS external USB hard drives and also use them as internal hard drives. As for memory I have 32GB about 3.2GB is accessible by the OS but I used a special Ramdrive software to tap into the other 28GB of invisible memory for a Ramdrive. Also XP isn't limited to dual cores. I'm using an Ivy Bridge Quad core and it sees all the cores. I'm also using the XP Professional version which may have more features than the XP Home edition.

R.I.P. security and efficiency.

Which archaic hardware?

Ivy Bridge i5-3570K isn't that dated yet.
Quad core underclocked down to 2.2GHz completely passive system.
XP SP3
32GB of DDR3

Typing about nostalgic gaming.

But no I haven't been playing any old school games in some time.

I used to play Mortal Kombat ][ on MAME all the time. I got too good at the arcades. Spent so much money on it I probably could have owned the machine.

This computer is capable of DOS, Windows XP, Vista, and Window 7 at the moment. I am not going to deal with Windows 8 and up on this system. I hate the bootloader for Windows 8.

You have the weirdest config lol.
Ah you're multibooting.. that Xp+32Gb Ram would have been absurd otherwise.

You can also use >2Tb external drives on Xp, if they have Advanced Format :)

The most I found in said link was that you may encounter problems with the PCI bus, since two cards will be sharing it, but no benchmark if that is truly the case, and should your motherboard support higher PCI speeds than the cards you are using, there shouldn't be any bottleneck. It's similar to saying that SLI is slower than single cards because it drops the PCI speed from x16 to x8.
They do though suggest to use an ISA card for Dos, but I get the feeling that it's mostly a compatibility issue, not a performance one.

I mean the roms. Haven't delved that deep into how the roms are translated to sound, but I do assume that the samples exist somewhere.

True, XP doesn't include the search in the start menu. Press start, type "Master of Magic", press enter. No hunting required.

Pinning seems superior to me, especially since you don't need the mouse to launch the first 10 icons pinned there. Win+# launches the program, Shift+Win+# launches a new instance of it (same as shift clicking). As for the show desktop, I do prefer the Win+D shortcut, much easier and simpler.
Still, you can have something similar to quicklaunch by adding toolbars to the taskbar. Not sure if you can move them to the left though.

Most likely it was the volume serial number, or a hash of it. I tried looking for more info, but I could only find information about the copy protection the Amiga and ST versions used, which seems to have been processor dependent, nothing about only one installation available.

Did a quick check about AAoW. Seems like the crack was a change of 3 bytes. Nothing that hard, and you should be still able to find the lengthier tutorial of how to end up with those bytes.
I did also find a reference that the VGA version of it had a manual lookup scheme instead, but I can't verify said claim.

Munt did get much better, but that was already maybe 2 years ago or so. I think I reported also here back then, before that I wasn't that happy with Munt because it sounded off, as if someone was playing Roland LA-synth music with wrong instruments and off the tune. But then one version update seemed to change all that and it started to sound pretty much perfect to my ears. I haven't done an actual side-by-side comparison, but Munt does sound exactly how I remember my CM-32L sounding.

My real Roland CM-32L is now totally unused, I don't feel any need to use it anymore as Munt works so good IMHO. In fact sometimes it works even better, it seems it can overcome some of the glitches that my real Roland unit has with some games. E.g. in the Wing Commander intro, with my real Roland unit I get the crackling sound on the fireworks (I think this is a known issue or "feature" with early CM-32L units, some sound clipping or something), while with Munt using CM-32L ROMs, they play cleanly. Also I got similar distorted or crackling sound in the Inferno intro music, while with Munt it also plays cleanly.

Also in general, since some DOS games were specifically optimized for either MT-32 or CM-32L/LAPC-1 (e.g. the cows sound odd in Heart of China with CM-32L/LAPC-1, while in Ultima Underworld you don't get the proper swimming sound with MT-32), it is easier to change the emulated unit with Munt depending on the game, by using either the MT-32 or CM-32L ROMs. I generally just use the CM-32L ROMs with everything though, as that's the one I'm used to, and the glitches for using the "wrong" Roland unit are generally quite minor anyway.

If you've played GOG games, many of them already use nGlide to emulate the 3Dfx support. For instance Tomb Raider 1 and Carmageddon 2 I think. Also with some games which support both Direct3D and 3Dfx Glide, GOG has chosen to emulate 3Dfx with Glide, instead of depending on old Direct3D versions, which may have problems with newer drivers/hardware. The emulated Glide support works more uniformly on different hardware. I think Messiah is one such game, some long-standing issues with the GOG version were fixed by switching to Glide instead of Direct3D.

VirtualMIDISynth is mainly needed in order to get better General MIDI sounds, than what the basic Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth can produce in Windows. So it is a replacement for my old Roland SCC-1 sound card, basically (the MS GS Synth sounds much worse).

In Windows Vista and later, VirtualMIDISynth is also handy in order for Munt to work (to be able to select the Munt driver for MT-32 music). It is possible to get by also without it, but then you need to edit DOSBox config files separately.

They are the actual Roland MT-32 or CM-32L control and PCM ROMs ripped from the real Roland units. You have to tell Munt whether you want to use the MT-32 or CM-32L ROMs. They don't come with Munt by default, you have to acquire them elsewhere.

I think if you truly wanted to play a Windows 95 / 98 game you would need an older computer. Preferably a socket 1366 system with an AGP slot would do the job. Socket 1155 and higher at the moment due to the lack of an AGP port for one makes it difficult to find Windows 95 / 98 drivers. However, until I test my idea of tracking down a suitable PCI graphics card from that era it might be possible to play Windows 95 / 98 games on a modern system. You'll also need a PCI sound card with the appropriate drivers.

But a sure thing would be a P4 with an AGP slot if you want to keep it simple.

As for DOS games only very specific ones that were affected by clock speed would not work on any modern computer even under DOSBOX. Some of these are self bootable floppies and when attempting to boot those it would freeze up. For those systems you'll most likely want to get a 286 16MHz which seems to be the most compatible speed that would still be able to play 100% of everything even if it was slightly faster than the original 4.77MHz PC XT. Some even included a slider knob to downclock to 4.77 MHz or 8 MHz and I've seen 10 MHz. Back then games were very clock sensitive. Landmark System Speed Test was what everyone used to compare their performance to others.

My preference for a nostalgia computer would be a 486 33 MHz at the max since you can get 8MB max memory on the motherboard. Compatibility seems to drop significantly as you go faster to the 486 50Mhz range and higher into the early Pentium 60Mhz so in my opinion not worth the hassle.

Luckily on the faster end my P4 3.06GHz was the peak of backward compatibility before they completely phased out ISA slots. You could probably play 98% of all DOS games on it natively including the 3D Monster graphics supported ones. I've seen some modern motherboards with 1155 socket and one ISA slot but they are going for $400 and up from some 3rd party manufacturer most likely in Taiwan. Since I never invested in one of those I can't tell you if a Sound Blaster ISA card would function properly on those and yet again be able to play your old DOS games the want they should sound at least for MIDI. Another reason why 1 ISA slot is not sufficient for me is because if I want to do a network between two DOS machines to play Doom 1 or Doom 2 for example over a LAN it would not be possible. Then the other issue is requiring a serial port if you wish to hook up an external analog modem such as a US Robotics HST Dual Standard 14.4K for dial up network play. Yes that kind of network play existed on some very old DOS games. F29 Retaliator was one game I recall being able to dial up to another guy and playing. I think Warcraft 1 Orcs and Humans might have also had modem to modem dial up play as well.

But for most people's needs I'd say DOSBOX on any modern machine will take care of maybe 90% maybe even up to 95% of the DOS games that have ever existed.

There are a few issues with DOSBOX in the syntax area that is different than real DOS. Most notably one that nags me is when typing in:

DIR /o-d

which should list all files in descending time order in the current directory which is not existent in DOSBOX at all. There are some other syntax commands I remember missing but can't recall at the moment.