I've been finding that sometimes the enjoyment I get out of hunting down an old game, getting it to work on my system, and tweaking the .ini files and in-game settings for maximum enjoyment ends up being more fun than playing the game itself. Sometimes I'll download games, get them to run, and never even look at them again.

Am I alone in this?

I like to tweak the conf files for dosbox games released on gog, and also replace the older dosbox versions included with some of them with my own latest version.

I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with this. Sometimes I get incredibly frustrated, when I just can't get a game to work, no matter what I do (for an example: Shadow of the horned rat), but when you do get an extra tricky game to actually run, it is a lovely feeling.

I've gotten lazy. It wasn't so long ago that I would spend hours tweaking Windows (95 and 98) to run my old DOS games. I must have spent days trying to get anything from Interplay running, often resorting to boot disks for the older titles, and cheating around with the newer ones.

Now, not so much. I guess DOSBox has really spoiled me. I tweak for ten minutes and it works perfectly. At least, most of the time. I did spend a week trying to get Descent to Undermountain to run but was unsuccessful.

For now anyway. ;)

One of the most annoying cases was when I (very recently) tried to get Alien Logic to run on my computer. The game just kept complaining about "files" being set too low. I tried a fresh dosbox install, and it did not work (removed all previous dosbox files). I tried to download mods for dosbox. That did not work. I tried to edit every parameter that I could find that, might do something about the whole files issue. It did not work.
Then I did another fresh install, to start over from scratch (my dosbox installation was looking more and more like a patchwork monster). And the game just ran flawlessly. I did not do anything, and it just worked, even though it refused to work just recently.

I had that with cracking games when I was still young. Once I finally had an especially tough one running, I often let it sit on my HD and deinstalled it half a year later without even bothering.

Nowadays I just buy them and let them sit on my shelf for ages ...

There was a funny cinema tycoon game once... every single aspect of the game was handles by plain text files... I spent days to exchange all the fake actor and movie names with the real names and adding my very own too :)

That was a great time, but I don't have that time anymore, so I do just purchase games, maybe install them, and wait until I have a spare minute to play a bit on one of the thousand games I have :)

Files are set to a far higher number by default (127, of my memory serves) in dosbox, and I modded it to consider files to be 200, yet the game claimed that files was =40, no matter what I did... until it just decided to work on its own. And dosbox does not have a config.sys, you need to take care of such things in other ways.

I got fed up trying to get old games run ok on modern OS when so many older games try to install some god-awful old versions of Quicktime, Intel Indeo or whatever obsolete media decoder, and you can't be sure if it is safe to let the game to try to install them on e.g. Windows 7, and whether it would work anyway. Why couldn't games simply use MPEG-1 to begin with? Sure it looks grainy, but it is not like the FMW in old games was so great anyway.

I now rather opt for buying the game from GOG, or failing that, play it on a WinXP or even Win98SE installation. Sometimes I may try to get an old game to run on Win7, at least if it isn't related to those obsolete media format problems.

Then again, I am unsure if the FMV matters that much. I was happily playing Wheel of Time (FPS) on Win7 without even realizing it was skipping all the FMV parts (intros, between levels etc.). I installed the latest Quicktime and sure enough the game now shows the FMV, but like one frame per three seconds, ie. as a slideshow, skipping most of the frames. If I run those quicktime files from the Quicktime app itself, they play fine.

Apple, GFY with your non-working Quicktimes and proprietary IPads and whatever. I sure am happy I went to buy an ASUS Transformer TF101 Android tablet (with the neat detachable keyboard) for my girlfriend, instead of the IPad2 that I was this close to buying.

(Then again, Intel can go to hell as well with their obsolete Intel Indeo.)

Sure I could play WoT without the FMV, but I want the full experience. Now it feels too much like playing some shitty pirated CD-rip. So I guess I will play it on XP or 98SE instead. Or then play the FMW separately from Quicktime app in Win7 whenever I complete a level. :)