I got the bug tonight to try one of my old PC games. I still have several of them on my hard drive dating back to the early to mid 1990’s. Each time I re-image PC, I make sure that I preserve these games by backing up and restoring their directory structures.
I wasn’t sure if they would work under Windows 7 but I decided to give it a try. I made a few attempts to get Doom II launched using various compatibility mode settings but none worked.
When that failed, I quickly stumbled on skulltag.com. It’s a free Windows download which lets you play Doom and Doom II on modern Windows platforms. Not only that, you can play online with other players from the internet. I downloaded and installed the software and I was literally playing online with another player within a minute.
The following videos bring back a lot of great memories of modem and LAN gaming with old friends in my 20’s and are nothing short of amazing!
Doom II finished in 14:41
Quake finished in 17:38
Quake 2 finished in 21:06
I’m surprised that you didn’t try a virtualization focused solution first like DosBox or a VM in Workstation 🙂
I’ll have to check out skulltag.com.
VM running an old school OS would have been my predictable choice, however, I didn’t have the time to invest to get that set up. SkullTag was very fast and efficient. Perhaps long term I will set up a legacy gaming VM. Many of the SkullTag servers use modified .WADs which I don’t have any longer. I’m definitely not getting back into the .WAD download business. I just wanted to play a few classic maps of Doom from my younger years.