Oh My God, Epic Pinball...

There's a game that I didn't hear about in at least 10 years. I happen to have the shareware demo here, on Floppy disk. I installed it tonight for the sake of testing, and I got the same results as you: crappy music and sluggish ball. I wouldn't say that it is very playable.

HOWEVER! I was able to get it running at full speed, with it's retro music playing properly and all! Here are the steps I followed, it should work for you too.

1- Download and install DosBOX, the Win32 installer version: http://www.dosbox.com/
2- Run it. You should have an icon on your desktop to do so.
3- It will show you a DOS-like window. You'll have to "mount" the directory of the game to access it. If you've installed it in the default directory ( C:\Pinball ), then type "mount w C:\Pinball".
4- Enter "W:" . This brings you directly in the directory of the game.
5- You have to configure the sound. Enter "Setup", then Enter. Select the following options: Soundblaster, 7, 1, 220H.
6- Run the game by typing "Pinball".
7- Enjoy!

This is an example of the games that prompted me to create my "PC Gaming" topic. Games like these don't seem to be produced anymore...

My dad has that. On CD. "We" have had it since I was 10 or so. I didn't know it was a "recognized title" - it looked pretty generic to me, even at the time.

When a game goes superfast, it is because of a "speed" setting that was introduced into games when they FIRST started to become MILDLY obsolete - the way most 17-year-olds might look at XBox (original) now, but which really actually applies to the N64 about now - at that time, the copis of the games that were being printed added a speed setting which you could change from 1 - 10, 10 being so-fast-I-can't-see-it-OMG-my-eyez-r-bleeding. Most commonly seen in Pac-Man, for fun.

Edited by God on February 18, 2009 at 11:45:27.

Hm, it's possible that you have a more recent version than mine...

In any case, under DosBOX, if you need to manually configure a soundcard, these are the values to use:
Card: Soundblaster or Soundblaster 16 (NOT Pro)
IRQ: 7
DMA: 1
Port: 220H

I so don't miss the days where I had to spend an hour to get a simple DOS game setup and running properly...

Definitely! I still play some from time to time, and I'm actually playing around the idea of purchasing a few new games in the upcoming months. Yes, I'm talking about getting new DOS games in 2009. I didn't have a chance to play them before, and it's better late than never in my book!

Glad to know that you got it to work!

Well, I meant "new" as in "new to own". I believe that it still counts as such if I haven't played it! There haven't been any professional releases in years, though.

Well why would they care if they aren't selling them anymore and therefore couldn't make money off of it anyway?

I never even had a problem running a game... my floppies always worked.

Besides, some old DOS games are still being sold by the companies that first published them!

Have the right, sure; I was commenting on the "caring" part.

Hmm... the games sold there ran off Windows on my PC... for DOS games I'm thinking even similar, like yes Pac-Man and Pinball, Jeopardy, etc.

Edited by God on February 19, 2009 at 21:11:20.

I took a chance and tried it out with a DOS game from 1996 requiring CD-ROM support (read here: memory intensive), and it worked flawlessly after I enabled CD support.

As such, I'm pretty confidant that you'll be able to get your game to run if you follow about the same steps as Tri-Edge. Just change the filenames and directories as appropriate, of course. The game is also listed as compatible on the DOSBox site, so I think you're in luck!