I realise that the Voodoo 4 & 5 cards still have some life left in them.  Arguably they can still deliver some of the finest AA you can get for games like flight and driving sims.  Additionally they provide exemplary support for online games based on such things as the Unreal game engine.

But five years from now?

There are many legacy games that can and will only look and run at their best on 3Dfx (or 3dfx) cards.  I plan on having a Voodoo2 SLI system installed as long as there are PCI slots to support it.  Currently I am playing the original GTA (brought on by GTA3), Carmageddon in DOS glide (brought on by bloody mindedness) and 3Dfx Shadow Warrior.  I don't want the inevitable march of progress to prevent me from playing these and similar games in all their glory on a 3Dfx card.  For a significant time 3Dfx led the field and games were written specifically for their cards.

I've always been grateful for the backwards compatibility of the PC.  I play many games that will only run in DOS (let alone Windows 95/98 and completely forgetting XP).  We're going to lose this and I'm going to have to set up something I've been avoiding.  A legacy PC.  >:(

Well...

MS has worked hard to push away from MS-DOS, and Win95/WinNT ; Win98 is already clearly on their 'abandon' list.

But with Dual Boot Systems, it should always be possible to run all old Games :)
That should make all old Games run fine under MS-DOS and/or Win9x...

The biggest Problem might be having a too fast CPU though :P
Last time I checked with 'Software Brakes', most I found on the net were already unable to slow down an Athlon sufficiently in order to prevent runtime errors.

Greetings
FalconFly

Yes, there's CPU speed, but also the ever changing field of PC "standards".  There are already "legacy free" motherboards for sale trying to make it look like missing some features is in some way clever.

I watched my precious ISA slots being eaten away, the floppy disk drive is becoming optional, serial and parallel ports will be subsumed by USB and firewire, and PCI slots will be next.  :(

I agree that dual booting is a good route to take.  But, when the hardware itself gets too incompatible, there will be no alternative for the truly dedicated PC gamer but to build a separate legacy system.

Yes, that's definitely correct.

If ISA is still needed, there's no choice but to keep the old Hardware in secondary Systems...

Yet, there's a good thing with running those secondary Systems :
Their Hardware is usually still available widespread, and it's cheap, as 'modern' Users abandon them ;)

Also, no AthlonXP or Pentium4 is required to play those old MS-DOS Games, so having them run on a dedicated System is actually saving one alot of hassle to reconfigure modern Systems for their use.

Maybe the 'alternative' is therefor even the best solution, since it is running on old, but proven reliable technologies ?
(provided the household has enough space for more computers ;) )

Greetings
FalconFly

Running old Programs on new Computers is an interesting Topic. On one hand staying compatible to those old Programs in new operating systems makes them bigger and hard to configure because of all those old libriaries and technics. Remember the Dos-Background  from 1982 DOS till 2000 in WIN ME. So it blocks new technologies because the os has to be compatible. On the other Hand  we all want to run our old apps'n'games in the new os. Only less companies make updates and ports. This is the same thing that prevents Linux from beeing an alternative on the desktop. As long as your favorite game won't be ported to linux or does not run under DOSEMU or WINE your are stuck. Emulators are great things but need so much more CPU Power and RAM you can only run very old Programs. The day that you can run all your old DOS games with GLIDE in an emulator is far. ..

Regards,
Andreas

Funnily enough, FalconFly, one of the main things preventing me from having a legacy system here already is space.  I live in a tiny thatched cottage where we are very short on space (indoors anyway ;)).

And yes, nudgegoonies, I often think that some kind of DOS emulator could be an answer.  On XP we've already got VDM Sound emulating a SoundBlaster DOS environment.

The ideal DOS emulator would have to be a very sophisticated program indeed.  It would have to mediate between a range of old games with vastly different requirements and Windows XP and its descendents.  The hard bit is the games.  Some require expanded memory, some require extended memory, some require VCPI, some require VGA, some require VESA modes and on and on.  And I somehow doubt that, if some genius wrote one, they'd ever remember to include good old DOS glide. :-/

You are absolutely right  procerus. A perfect emulator has to emulate different processors at different speed's with different controllers. For that you need the knowledge of all the hardware interna of many different chips (are the internas of 3dfx chips available?). This needs enormous cpu-power. A good c64 emulator tha emulates the 2 1mhz 8bit cpu's that the c64 and it's floppy have needs minimum a Pentium with 133 MHZ.  What Power must a cpu have to fully emulate a Pentium 133? Most emulators now are more like vdm's that run most of the code native.  But a dos-window is also some kind of a vdm and remember how much problems old dos-games have in a window...

Bye,
Andreas

I dream that someone, somewhere will write a DOS games emulator that will run on future mainstream (read Microsoft) operating systems.  But, as I have said, I just hope they remember to include DOS glide!

The task would be a mammoth one.  And the financial rewards would be non-existant to tiny.  So I suspect it won't happen.

The Macintosh has repeatedly written off its legacy programs.  And it is amazing that Microsoft wrote Windows 9x and ME to be so compatible with older programs.  After all they make still more money by selling updated programs to go with their updated operating systems.  >:(

It would take a very gifted and very dedicated genius to write the necessary emulator.  Otherwise we are looking at running two systems, one for current, and one for legacy, programs.

And that would be a shame.  The PC is a technological cludge.  And its only merit is its backwards compatibility.