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Hi all, first time post here. Ok, here's my question/problem:
I would really love to replay my favorite game when I was growing up, namely, Starflight (and it's sequel, but, I'm still working on the first for the moment). If you have not ever played it, I highly suggest you give it a go. At any rate, The problem with running this game is that when it was written, it was coded in such a way to depend on fixed clock settings to get it's own time management. In other words, the game's speed is dependent upon the CPU it runs on. So, if you try to load up the program on a modern machine, it goes blazingly fast and is quite unplayable.
So, one means people have found to play it, is to use a program which will slow down a computer. There are several I have tried: moslo, turbo, slowdown, and icd. Of those, moslo performs the best, but, it's not quite "right". Basically, it still runs much quicker than it should and for the most part, all those program work by "pausing" for a certain time, then running for the rest of the time (slow/stop for a while, then go really fast, slow, fast, slow fast) which is really not a good way to play. The one thing they do well is they allow me to relive the original colors and sounds (from the pc speaker!). What others have done is gone out and bought a 486 machine and used one of these slow down programs to run these games. This apparently works on a 486, but, I'm running a P3 800 and I don't have the space for an extra box.
One solution is to run a MAC emulator (basilisk II) and play the mac version of the game. However, it just isn't the same for me to do that. For one, the look is very different, and second, I can't get sound from it (aside from an annoying ding when I try clicking somewhere it doesn't like).
Then I hit upon the idea of, instead of trying to slow down the machine, just emulate an XT and run it that way. So far, I've met little to no success doing this. I've tried 2 emulators so far, the XT-CE program (which, I can't get sound out of and can't run in color, only B&W) and MESS (which I don't really understand how to use).
I was wondering if anyone here could lend a hand in getting these great games running on a modern machine. Either, by showing/helping me with getting MESS to work (I can't figure out how to get imgtools to put the starflight executables into a bootable image) or by suggesting a different emulator, or, finding a way to slow down a machine, etc. Any solution would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
By the way, I'm running a p3 800 machine with Win2k on it if that helps at all.
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