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See just what a 286 can do!

C

Chris Miller

New Member
Joined
Jan 24, 2011
Messages
8
That's no photoshop. I managed to get Epic Pinball running on my Compaq SLT/286. It plays well enough, but the ball moves too quickly for that monochrome display, so I have to use an external monitor. It helps that I used EMU386 :3
 

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I actually had Pinball Arcade (A compilation that included Pinball Dreams and other tables from that series) running on a PS/2 Model 50 with PC speaker for sound and a Backpack parallel port CD-ROM. Pretty cool that it ran as well as it did.
 
I had a horribly slow Pinball game on my 8088, kinda thought it was Epic Pinball. Hmm.. by memory I think it looked more like full tilt pinball (thought I remember text on the side). Either way, it was playable if you didn't know any better lol .. sitting waiting for the updates to slowly watch the ball go up the launcher and around.. hoping the joystick or keyboard will register your keystroke in time to animate the movement of the paddle to stop the ball.
 
Chris Miller:

Just wondering what OS your currently using. If your running DOS 6 (or better) you might try loading SMARTDRV into you AUTOEXEC and see if you game improves. There are other non-MS cachng utilities out there that may run on your 286. It's been while since I fired up my 286, so I'm a little hazy on the old tricks.
 
I'm using DOS 6.22 currently. Yeah, I disabled smartdrv because it was messing with my XMS.
 
Setting buffers=99 (buffershigh=99) provides a small cache, enough to greatly reduce continual hunts to the FAT anyway.
 
I re-enabled it, so it looks like this
AUTOEXEC.BAT
c:\DOS\SMARTDRV.EXE /X
@ECHO OFF
PROMPT $p$g
PATH=C:\WINDOWS;C:\DOS;C:\UTIL
SET TEMP=C:\DOS

CONFIG.SYS
rem DEVICE=C:\DOS\SETVER.EXE
DEVICE=C:\DOS\HIMEM.SYS
DEVICE=C:\DOS\EMU386\EMU386S.EXE
DOS=HIGH
FILES=30
STACKS=9,256


EDIT: Oddly, and I have no idea why, Silverball runs perfectly, even though it's the same game engine.
 
SETVER is only inportant if your games specifies a lesser OS - like 4.01 or 3.3. Try loading EMU386 first in the CONFIG.SYS.
 
Pinball on computers is great !

Pinball on computers is great !

Yes, it is fantastic in so many ways.

I have it now on my Vista, before Win XP and Win ME.

Many different games and great stress releif !

Do a Google search to see what pinball games are still available.

I had some posts on this topic also on this site.

Much better than a real machine in many ways - no quarters to keep putting in - if home personal machine no repair bills.

Enjoy !

Frank
 
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