How to play old games.

Diablo II notes (15.0, wine-devel, new WoW64)

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ksolowoniuk said:
Retroarch is a blast.
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G U Y Z !! (sorry for this happens at this point. But I have to place it somewhere, since it *cough*pisses me for quite a while. So sorry, ksolowoniuk, it hits you. Please don't take this meant as to be personal. It is NOT. It is meant general! It was just that this was the occasion my Stetson flew off (could have happened to anybody else) :cool: [sorry, sorry, sorry!]) ...
...Guyz,
could you PLEAZZzzzsss(!) just add some link, when you annotate something like that? 
Now of course I am interested in, what "Retroarch" is. Now I have to ddg it. Why not just - plz - make it a small link to port's or its home page, if you recommend something...
T H A N K S!
:beer: :cool:
 
I've got Quake 2 running with Wine Proton. I haven't yet figured out how to get Proton to recognize that my Nvidia card actually does support ray tracing, but if I ever do I'm looking forward to Quake 2 RTX:
 
Dosbox is least good choice to enjoy DOS games. It is good for occasional run, but as a high level emulator it is highly inaccurate across the board.

One that thinks this is harsh opinion, probably did not fire up a real DOS computer + game in a long long while.

Second best thing is 86Box, full machine emulator. If you have a 3 GHz modern CPU you can easily emulate a Pentium 100 with 16-bit sound card hence play all DOS games apart from the late 3D ones in VESA mode.

Maturin said:
Now of course I am interested in, what "Retroarch" is. Now I have to ddg it. Why not just - plz - make it a small link to port's or its home page, if you recommend something...
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It is a multi system emulator with 10 foot UI, available in ports under that name.

I don't like it, well I don't dislike it either, but 1000-in-1 using TV interface is not my thing. Just navigating countless flat menues in and out is annoying, it is 10 times quicker to click/enter that out in normal forms based GUI. Retroarch has introduced libretro 'standard' where existing open source emulators can pack up their business logic in a library - the benefit on FreeBSD, there are libretro 'plugins' whose original full project counterpart does not build on FreeBSD, at least they're usable through Retroarch

In any case if you do not have a ROM archive with hundreds to thousands of ROMs with multiple systems, you don't really need Retroarch.
 
Isn't Apple II completely underpowered to run this game fluidly? I'm looking at YT videos and the frame rate drops significantly in combat.
Something like a 286 10 MHz with EGA was cheap budget PC in 1989, and it is able to play Prince at full frame rate all the time.
 
If you wanted to give RetroArch a try you would need to get it from the repos and then pick a libretro core for the platform you want to emulate. If you wanted to play old arcade games you would do something like the following. Then find a ROM file (like the ones you backed up from old arcade machines that you have in your garage ;) ).

sh: 
pkg install RetroArch
pkg search libretro
pkg install libretro-mame2003

It takes a bit of monkeying around to get everything working but there are plenty of resources online. DM me if you need help.
 
Maturin said:
No need to excuse. The old games may lack of modern graphics, but several I still play, like "Diablo" (1), "Master of Orion II", "Heroes of Might and Magic III" - all from the mid 90s - not only because of nostalgia, but because many of the old games were (are) simply just good games, while many of their successors have been enshittified, or the new ones are often just pretty well made game mechanics, but lack of a game really joyful to play.
However,​
there are several ways to do it:
  • Easiest way, as some already said, find it to play in the browser; there are several sites offering many old games to play directly in the browser without the need to install anything; there are lots of such sites, not only offering the old classics from homecomputers, consoles, and PC, but many tiny ones are also worth a trial. Downside: Most of the times there is no way to save the game, and sometimes there are only trial versions with limited levels. You need to check some out for yourself.
  • Get them by GoG for example, when you don't have the original installation medium anymore, and run them in VirtualBox, dosbox, wine or likewise. (Need some fumbling, especially when some 3D is involved, particulary wine, when the game is not listed in some preconfigured list like with winetricks.)online slots
  • Steam also offers some of the old games to play .
  • Some games like Quake are ported to run natively on FreeBSD or Linux - but you need the original installation medium for it.
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Yeah, Heroes III is the perfect example. I still go back to it every now and then and somehow lose an entire evening without noticing. Some old games just aged ridiculously well.
 
RylanMcDermott said:
Yeah, Heroes III is the perfect example. I still go back to it every now and then and somehow lose an entire evening without noticing.
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From a last week's game:
The artifacts are not so impressive, but the army is quite useful. 😁
Also enough spell points (pointless to pick Intelligence, though, but the other choice had been Ballistics for the last skill.)
And of course she can Townportal and Fly. :cool:
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I just found DosBox which lets me play old Infocom, Battlezone, QBert and others on my Win10 machine.

Super easy to use.
I don’t remember seeing any bloat running as a background process.
 
Triggered by HoMM mentioning :)

I have II/III on my PC in multiple iterations. For Heroes2 i use fheroes2 engine which is great, but does not load Succession Wars maps. I run original CD release from Heroes Compendium CD using a dosbox preset I made specifically for it, so it is launched from the start menu - similar approach used for GOG dos games on windows.

Heroes 3 has a wildly vivid ecosystem currently and I think all of it runs on FreeBSD using Wine. There is the entire WOG/ERA expansion engine from 2000s. Separate from that, there is a HD launcher from mid 2010s that brings its own expansion things and netplay lobby. It is also able to run WOG/ERA, but it is used to run "Horn of the Abyss" version which is another community expansion on H3 Shadow Of Death with bigger maps, more stuff and new races, and netplay lobby. Unlike WOG the amount of new things is lower but the graphical execution quality is higher, new races like the Cove look and feel like they were designed by the original team.

And there is the whole open source rewrite VCMI which is available in ports. I think it's almost 100% stable at the moment.

Heroes 4/5/6 work normally under wine and the newest one Olden Era (quite a good game it seems, played it a bit) runs on our linux-steam-utils without a glitch.
 
Zare said:
I think all of it runs on FreeBSD using Wine.
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I got me the "Complete Edition" (~twenty years ago.)
3 & 4 are trivial to get them running on VirtualBox. (While I prefer to play 3 over 4.)
Alas for 3 the DVD must be in drive; tried with some dd made iso image, but I guess the copy protection is kind of defects which are not copyable to an image; fumbled with some "no DVD cracks", none working; so haven't found a way yet, to get it running without DVD. But since I still have an optical drive and own the original DVD, no prob, just a nuisance. But probably that's not an issue, when you get a version at GoG or else.
Didn't got 5 running by now. As far as I may say, it's because of VB ain't fully supported under FreeBSD (No Guest Additions [?]) I fumbled & tinkered a lot with wine, but eventually gave up. I find wine very dissatisfying: lots of tinkering. When your game ain't in Wine's HQ How-To list, then it's all trial & error, only. And when you finally get something running just by coincidence, then soon there will be an update, and nothing runs anymore. Then also better deinstall and reinstall wine completely new. And start all over completely new again... - very dissatisfying. I have better things to do with my time than to constantly fumble with some tinker software, just to get and keep a couple of computer games running.
Advantage: Less playing, more time for more productive and useful things. :cool:
 
bgavin said:
I just found DosBox which lets me play old Infocom, Battlezone, QBert and others on my Win10 machine.

Super easy to use.
I don’t remember seeing any bloat running as a background process.
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Yeah, also under FreeBSD DOSbox works exactly the same (config file). And for old DOS games it's best choice IMO. But once you get some game from the era when games came for DOS and Windows at the same time, for some games it can become quite tricky, not to say impossible to get them run smoothly. There are several games I fumbled a lot in the config files, but no matter what I tried always something was not running right: some graphics (sprites?) not displayed right, mouse not working correctly, sound lagging, or the whole game too slow to be playable, stuttering, or crashing at some certain point.

Maturin said:
Computer games are technically most ambitious and pretty tricky at the same time.
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The only games I actually enjoy playing are the Infocom text-only ones.
Zork, et al.
I have them all, both original floppy retail packaging and the two Infocom CD collection disks.

I really liked Battlezone at the pizza parlor arcade, but don't seem to have much interest in it under DosBox where it does run the same as the arcade version.
The GUI games don't hold any interest for me.
Maybe Pacman for about 2 minutes but then lose interest.
 
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