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[Scatty]

Originally Posted by dipo

I love DosBox very much and I am also aware of VMDsound and such. But some games didn't run well or sound was flickering.

So I decided to create dual booting on my Pentium 3 - FreeDOS and XP.

Fortunately my PCI soundcard has still DOS drivers including SB16 emulation.

My little experiment works better then I thought. It's funny... If I decide just to play a short DOS game then DOS will boot in like 5 seconds.

Some games are working better then under DosBox, but not all. Some games behave pretty strange. Perhaps just a question of configuration and perhaps impossible.

Anyone interested in this? We could share some experiences.

Well that's still not quite the best system for older Ms-Dos and Windows95/98 games.
First of all Pentium III is mostly ok, but 3 Ghz is way too fast, hence the keyboard problem with Aladdin. Lowering the keyboard repeat rate and raising it's repeat delay in Dos (mode con: rate=5 delay=20 or similar, don't quite remember anymore) might help for some longer time, but not forever. 450 Mhz is an absolute maximum on Pentium III for Dos games, faster brings problems. More than 128 MB RAM is also not recommended, 64 is even better and safer.
Windows 95 and Ms-Dos 7 it uses is also perfect for all old Dos and Windows games, I didn't encounter any problems with it compared to Ms-Dos 6.22 whatsoever. Windows 98SE is also good. But Freedos might be worse in terms of compatibility.
And drop Windows XP, you're much better off to use a better computer only for Windows XP and internet and that Pentium III for old Windows95 / Dos games only. That Pentium III is not optimal for it anyway, and you also are forced to have more RAM than old games support without a problem.

Overall a relatively perfect system would be:
Pentium II 400 MHZ or Pentium III 450 MHZ
64 MB RAM, 128 does too
Soundblaster 16 (NOT Vibra, that one is a crap, and not Soundblaster AWE32, it's drivers take up too much conventional memory) with the 16 Bit ISA connection (NOT PCI, that will cause problems with Dos)
A Cirrus Logic graphics card with 2-4MB memory, or other card with same memory like S3 (not Tseng Labs, crap).
An older Ati RAGE with 8MB (not more) or similar 3D accelerator graphics card would do for some Windows 95/98 games too, as long as you have Dos drivers for it or UniVBE 5.1 supports it for VESA-support (often it doesn't though). You can download UniVBE 5.1 for Dos here.
Windows 95 / Windows 98 SE (98 is worse than 98 SE)