I'm putting some old parts together for a 98SE box- Athlon XP 2400+, 2GB DDR 400, GeForce 6800, 7200, or X1950 Pro (AGP 8X), full version 98SE. Half of my Might&Magic games don't want to play nice with XP.

I tried Arena with DOSBox and hated it. I'd like to try it in it's semi-native environment. I don't like working with command lines.

Will Arena. Daggerfall, etc, install easily with 98SE? I used to run DOS games though DOSShell until I got comfortable with making shortcuts in 3.11/95. My old D&D games installed in 95, but ran under DOS without ever seeing a command line. Will these do that under 98SE.

All the threads I saw here deal with DOSBox. What's the story with 98? If this will be a problem, I have even older hardware (Athlon 1GHz, DDR slow as hell, MX440, and Win95).

I'm fairly sure that you wont be able to install them without problems (if even possible) on XP.

Might work on 95 thou, never tried it on 95.

That was the cpu family (Athlon XP), not the OS (Windows XP).
AMD families- 386, 486, 586, Athlon, Athlon XP, Athlon 64, then the X2's.

I will use Windows 98SE for the OS.

I have an older computer just for DOS Games and the OS is Win98 SE.
Installation for Arena and Daggerfall works like a charm. No problems at all.
Enjoy the older games.

Thanks. Just what I needed. :goodjob:

Besides, you don't even need to restart Windows in DOS like in the good old times. Even for Arena. A double-click on the main game file will do it.

The XP 2400+ is too fast to run daggerfall properly you'll need some kind of slow down utillity to play it. What about your sound card. you'll want SB legacy support as well as MPU 401 or Roland midi too(you could use SB midi but it's much lower quaility).

Mo'Slo, or does anyone have a favorite? I planned on using the onboard sound, like I do for everything. I don't remember what chip that board has, but I had 2.1 speakers plugged into it for Morrowing and early runs at Oblivion.

If my memory serves me right, I'm pretty sure I played Daggerfall in Windows 98 under the command prompt. I'm pretty sure I had to go to DOS for Arena though.

If you don't like command lines, you are going to hate trying to get everything working in real DOS. Enjoy your memory allocation nightmare with Arena.

Your second setup with the 1Ghz processor MIGHT be slow enough to run everything with some sort of slowdown utility (like Mo'Slo). If you can get them working in Windows, I always preferred Turbo to Mo'Slo.

I played all my DOS D&D games from Windows. I started with DOS 6.2 and Windows 3.1. I can do DOS or a command line. I'd just have to remember how.

I can run Daggerfall on a W98 machine with an AMD 2300 or 2400 processor (I think. Somewhere just under 1.5gHz) without MoSlow or anything just fine. I'd try it first and see if you need it.