I have an ancient laptop from 2001 hooked up to my TV to serve as a DVD player, and I was thinking about also installing some old games on it from around the mid-to-late 1990s. I'm probably not going to connect it to the Internet, because it literally can't handle any modern browser aside from a beta version of K-Meleon.

Unfortunately, GoG seems to have ramped up the system requirements significantly. It says I need 512MB minimum to run games that only required 64MB and ran fine on a K6-2 when I was younger.

Is there any way I can get these games to work on older hardware, or do I actually have to upgrade this computer just to run old games? In theory, I could add another 256MB to that computer and bring it up to 512, but I would rather not have to open it up and work on it. The whole idea was to run games from an era that it could already handle.

Another idea I have is to try and obtain the original CDs of these games, although that's a last resort.

Any thoughts?

You'd probably be safe running most of the DOSBOX games on GOG. Other stuff would probably vary on a case by case basis...

[url=http://www.gogwiki.com/wiki/Category:Games_packaged_with_DOSBox]http://www.gogwiki.com/wiki/Category:Games_packaged_with_DOSBox[/url]

I wouln't worry about this 512MB requirement - for classics (pre 2K) at least (provided GOG installers do not require that amount of RAM).

I resurrected a machine like that some time ago and have it lying around now too. Not tried any games on it, so I wonder about the same really.

Actually, I want to run a series of Win32 games. The Journeyman Project series, to be specific.

The final game in that series, the third one, lists the following system requirements on the manufacturer website: But GoG says I need THIS: I feel like it [I]should[/I] work just fine, but GoG says it won't... thus I'm hesitant to buy anything.

According to the GOG store pages for the first Journeyman game, it has been "expanded with upgraded graphics and seamlessly integrated with full-motion video" and the third one features "enhanced graphics with double the video playback resolution over the original CD-ROM release"

Could that explain for the difference in the system requirements compared to the original release?

My only other thought would be that GOG might be extra cautious with their system requirements since most people have at least a 1.8GHz CPU and so on these days.

DOSBox games have to emulate the hardware of a DOS machine (CPU, graphics, sound, etc.) so it wouldn't be surprising for a game bundled with DOSBox to have requirements significantly higher than the original, but as far as I know the Windows games on GOG shouldn't have that issue.

Papers, Please lists 2GB RAM as a requirement. I only have 1GB and it ran fine. Not sure if this is an indication of a general cautionary approach to specifications on GOG game cards.

It's the opposite actually - DOSBox requires a relatively strong CPU and that laptop ain't gonna cut it by a loooong shot.

A month or two ago, I installed a retro PC and tried many GOG games and what you have to be careful of, is the fact that GOG has altered many games making them unplayable on old hardware or half broken. Especially games with GLIDE are a mess since they're converted to work with a Glide wrapper (emulator of Glide) which heavily increases the system requirements of these games. At least one in three games on GOG from around the turn of the century need much higher system requirements than they originally did I found. This isn't because GOG is being spiteful but it's a result of making these games run on modern systems.

That's honestly what I was afraid of. At this point, I don't even want to chance it. I guess I'm going to go hunting for the original CDs/DVDs. Obviously this service is exclusively for people who have all modern hardware. :/ I didn't think so. I knew DOSBox was quite a beast, but I thought a native Win32 game should run fine on a native Win32 platform. I always needed a boot disk with DR-DOS or something to run DOS games anyway, on this old thing. I know it's not out of spite, they're trying to add value for modern users with some of the enhancements.

But still... Glide wrappers? Ugh. I hate those things, I played around with them a few years ago, and they're the most ugly, inefficient way of getting anything to work. I wouldn't use them for personal use, much less distribute something that depended on them.

No wonder it has 32x the system requirements, if they did that.

Thanks, guys, but I guess I'll have to find another way of getting these games. I mean, sure I could play them on my modern machine, but I really only wanted to get the game so I'd have another excuse to play around with my old hardware. I like showing what older computers are capable of, and I have more than enough games for my modern machines.

DOSBox has quite a few enhancements over a common DOS machine though, such as mounting disk images and treating MP3/OGG files as if they were audio tracks off the CD. Those games that make use of this (for example games that check for a file on the CD as a manner of copy protection, or that play CD audio as background music) would require some work to be usable.

I would be wary of anything using DOSBox to function, but anything that is just a straight-up Windows binary should be okay. For example, Unreal or Unreal Tournament would probably run fine. Heroes of Might and Magic 3 as another. Deus Ex? Anacronox? The Baldur's Gate series, Planescape Torment.

You know you can always try the 30-day money back guarantee if it doesn't work?

http://www.gog.com/support/website_help/money_back_guarantee

So buy it and if it doesn't work, ask for the refund. :)