DOS games are notoriously difficult to get to work on modern PCs, especially ones running Windows XP. There are a few solutions about.

Some old games didn't bother using the system clock for timing, but relied on your CPU running at a certain speed. Stupid as this method is, it causes major problems playing old games on modern PCs as they play, often, 1000s of times faster than they were meant to! You might want to try and combat the problem of games running too fast by using a 'slowdown utility', effectively slowing your CPU down so the game plays at the right speed. One such utility, 'CPUkiller' (Windows-based, the best I've been able to find), is available for download from our 'Utilities' page.

Sound is usually the major problem if you can get the game to run at the right speed. A great project, VDMsound, has tried to tackle this by emulating an old DOS soundcard, fixing the sound problems with some DOS games. Unfortunately, it was only designed primarily for Windows XP, but there is a port to Windows 95/98 available here, attached to this forum post (may not be very stable!).

However, I've saved the best till last. :-) There is a project under development that aims to emulate not just a soundcard, not just a slow CPU - but an entire 386/486 PC running DOS. This effectively means you can have an old DOS PC running on your modern computer! The whole works - motherboard, video card, etc. - are emulated, as the idea is to emulate the entire old IBM PC. It's a very cool project, and is getting better and compatible with more games at every release. Its name? DOSBox. Yeah, you may have heard of it. That's because it rocks. Go try it, use it, and have fun playing your old DOS games the way they were meant to be played! The only drawback is that you will need a seriously powerful PC to use it with most games (PC emulation is no easy task), which is frustrating considering you're playing games which were designed for PCs *far* slower than modern ones!

Windows 3.11 games are 16-bit, meaning they were written for really rather old processors that were around at the time of Windows 3.11. However, they should be quite possible to run on Windows 95, 98 and XP without too many problems. Windows XP has a special emulation layer called 'wowexec' (Windows-on-Windows Execution) which, in a nutshell, lets Windows 3.11 software run on Windows XP. Windows 95/98 have something similar too, and should be able to run Windows 3.11 games just fine. As for the next version of Windows, who knows... but the current versions should be OK with these games.

Obviously these won't be a problem if you're actually running Windows 95/98, but you may occasionally have a problem playing Windows 95/98 games on Windows XP. I'd recommend two things.

Firstly, make sure you have the latest version of DirectX installed. This is a set of libraries that allow many games to run properly, and old versions of DirectX may cause problems with games.

Secondly, try using Windows XP's compatibility mode. There are a few options you can mess around with, to try and get Windows 95/98 games to work in Windows XP. To access this, in Windows Explorer, right-click on the .exe file of the game in question, and navigate to the 'Compatibility' tab. There you will see some options that you can enable that will make Windows XP behave slightly differently when running this executable. Sometimes this helps to coax older games into working, although I must confess it's rare that this particular facility helps me to run a game.