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Don Y[_3_]

On 2/5/2016 11:57 AM, wrote:
On Fri, 05 Feb 2016 13:06:13 -0500, wrote:

On Fri, 5 Feb 2016 11:28:02 -0600, philo wrote:

Last night I was going through some *old* paperwork and on the back of a
report found a very simple program I wrote in Qbasic.
Did a drive search and found a backup from a 386 I had worked on a long
time ago and it had my program on it along with a few games.
I mainly use Linux now but installed DosBox to see if the stuff would run.
It did!
Played Nibbles a few times just for laughs and enjoyed it.
I am not a gamer and never played anything newer than Tetris.

You did good ! I would have bet against it.
Brought-to-mind my first pc - Tandy 386 -
and how proud I was after upgrading the memory and
adding a math co-processor. Old fav games included
Lemmings, Sokoban, and a few of the Sierra ones
.. Leisure Suit Larry, Police Quest ..
My archives consist of saving the hard drives from all
the old pc's ... doubt I could retrieve much from them
now, even if I wanted to ..
John T.

Why not? You can connect them to a windows machine and it will read
FAT just fine.

Compaq introduced the IDE drive with their 386 machines. Other
machines were still using ST506 technology.

You may also discover that a modern BIOS expects LBA addressing to
be a panacea and may not work with the tiny drives (i.e., 1GB!) from
that era. I keep a handful of smallish drives on hand for legacy equipment
simply because new drives confuse old BIOS's; the reverse is likely true,
as well.

There are limits to "backward compatibility".

You could also load it as C: and get a blast from the
past. W/3.1 is sweet on a P4. Your games might run a little too fast
to be useful tho.

Unlikely that all of the legacy drivers would work with newer hardware.
Most old games talked directly to soundblaster, GUS MAX, etc. audio.
Anything that required a genuine serial/parallel port is likely to choke
when encountering a USB driven counterpart.

I loaded my old A-10 Warthog game and found it was impossible to even
take the plane off without crashing.

I can no longer run BRIEF as software timing loops make it hundreds
of times too fast for a human interface.

You may also notice some visual artifacts with legacy games on modern
hardware. A romp through the MAME forums might give you an idea of
the sorts of things to look for.

Also, copy protection schemes (key disks, etc.) may fail to work
on modern hardware (in which the software can't directly access
specific IO ports but, instead, have to deal with a virtualization
layer).

DOSBOX is an option tho since you can slow down the apparent CPU
speed.
I still run dBaseIV in DOSBOX and it really screams. The extended
memory driver loads and it sees a huge virtual drive. I keep all of
this on a thumb drive that I mount in DOSBOX as C: and it is like I am
back in the 90s. Even the tiniest thumb drive or SD card is
unbelievably huge for a DOS w/3.1 environment.
I also took a little leftover space on one of my hard drives (100 meg
or so) and partitioned it as FAT so DOS will see it. I haven't done it
yet but one of these days I am going to "SYS" a DOS 6.3 boot loader on
it. I just do not have a diskette drive on this machine to get that
going.