Why do you like Civ Dos better than Win Civ? Or do you?

[stwils]

Is there anyone here who plays Win Civ or Civ Net? It seems nearly all of you play Civ Dos.

Why do you prefer Civ Dos?

I used to play Civ Dos and Win Civ on my Windows 98. But now I have Windows XP and can only play Win Civ. (I do not want Dos Box.)

I loved the old Dos graphics - especially the waves and the units. However it seems that Win Civ is clearer for the eyes. (That is especially true of Civ Net.)

What are your thoughts? Is Win Civ harder to obtain?

stwils

 

[simonnomis]

CivDos plays just fine on my XP. I'd never even heard of DosBox until a few weeks ago. Also, not a big fan of 'windowed' games.

 

[Dack]

stwils quotes in green
Is there anyone here who plays Win Civ or Civ Net?
Both a few times
Why do you prefer Civ Dos?
Better interface, terrain and graphics easer to distinguish.

I do not want Dos Box
Why the bias against DOSbox? Without it you could always try running it in an XP Command prompt. simonnomis has had luck on his pc. I’m sure he would be willing to give any advice you might want.

I loved the old Dos graphics - especially the waves and the units. However it seems that Win Civ is clearer for the eyes
Looks like your torn between the three. Everything is of course personal preference, one should choose the one that is most appealing.

Is Win Civ harder to obtain?
You indicated that you played both, which was harder to get?

 

[void]

CivDOS == Civ 1 for me. I originally played the Amiga version, but I only had 512K and you needed a meg to get the animations (heh). The next year I bought my first PC (a 386) so I could run a MUD on my dial-up connection, because someone had recently done a DOS port of LPmud...

Later, I decided to use the PC for something else... the DOS version of Civ 1. And ever since, it's been hanging around on whatever PC-du-jour I had.

I play Civ1 with XP, no DOS Box. I tried Dos box cause everyone here always talks about it, but I didn't like it, the units move way too quickly. I like the drama of the slow movements. (I made the units attack this way in my Palm OS port as well...)

 

[Whelkman]

I've successfully launched CIVDOS from every Windows since 3.0, and it's the same in every version: atrociously slow and prone to random shutdowns. VDMSound has no effect, but I think turning off one of the compatibility options speeds things up a little--maybe fast paste.

 

[void]

I always choose 1 - 1 - 1 for the initial options (I like to listen to music while I play - in fact I think I've never played it with sounds on in my life), so maybe it's the sound that makes it atrociously slow... (?)

 

[Whelkman]

[M]aybe it's the sound that makes it atrociously slow... (?)

I haven't listened to Civ's sound regularly in years; I, too, choose 1,1,1 in the general case.

 

[void]

I guess I'm just used to the slowness then. In fact, the speediness when using Dosbox was one thing that annoyed me, heh...

But really, the speed it plays at without dosbox is the same speed I remember it playing at in the early 90's in DOS, and in the Amiga version... I wonder, is dosbox speeding it up faster than it ran originally in DOS?

 

[nova10]

I prefer CivWin over CivDos. As it is for most people who prefer CivDos, it's due to the graphics. I would like to point out that it IS possible to have the waves occur in CivWin but you need to be in 256 (8-bit) color mode. If it were possible to put most of the graphics from CivDos into CivWin, many people might switch over.

 

[Whelkman]

is dosbox speeding it up faster than it ran originally in DOS?

In DOS, Civilization performance improvements are noticeable up until about a Pentium 100, whose horsepower would obliterate the 7 MHz 68000 in early Amiga computers.

 

[void]

... I think turning off one of the compatibility options speeds things up a little--maybe fast paste.

I have a windows shortcut pointing to civ.exe. I don't think I modified any of the settings, but in my shortcut I see:

Memory
Conventional Memory: Protected - checked
Extended (XMS) Memory: Uses HMA - checked
Screen
Fast ROM Emulation - checked
Dyanmic Memory Allocation - not checked
Misc
Fast pasting - checked
Compatibility
nothing checked

Just in case any of that is relevant.

 

[void]

In DOS, Civilization performance improvements are noticeable up until about a Pentium 100, whose horsepower would obliterate the 7 MHz 68000 in early Amiga computers.

Ah OK, since my only actual DOS experience was on the 386, 16 MHz I believe, then I would have had a different experience than someone who remembers using DOS on a P-100! By the time I upgraded to a Pentium class, it was running Win95, and thus running in a DOS shell within windows, just as it does today...

So, maybe windows makes DOS programs act in a slow way similiar to a 386. No doubt some games depend on the timing. (Remember the turbo button some PC's used to have?)

 

[Whelkman]

So, maybe windows makes DOS programs act in a slow way similiar to a 386. No doubt some games depend on the timing. (Remember the turbo button some PC's used to have?)

Whatever Windows does to make Civilization slow has been there since the 16 bit days; Civ was one of the few 16 bit DOS games I recall not running adequately in Windows 3.x. The performance issue is strange given that Civilization is such a "vanilla" DOS game. With EGA compatibility and 512K RAM (I think, even if the specs insist on 640K), Civilization is playable on the original IBM 5150. Therefore, the virtual 8086 sessions Windows 3 liked to dish out should have been perfectly suitable.

Specific to Civilization, some operations, like unit movement and flashing, are internally timed, while others, like drawing the city display or generating a new map, are instructed to complete as soon as possible. You are correct in that many games depend entirely on hardware timing.

 

[Whelkman]

since my only actual DOS experience was on the 386, 16 MHz I believe, then I would have had a different experience than someone who remembers using DOS on a P-100!

I'll add that the only tangible performance enhancements between the 386 SX/25 and the Pentium 90 I upgraded to were map generation and map scrolling speeds. Even drawing the city display was pretty fast on a 386. Unit movement and flashing were the same in both architectures.

 

[void]

I'll add that the only tangible performance enhancements between the 386 SX/25 and the Pentium 90 I upgraded to were map generation and map scrolling speeds. Even drawing the city display was pretty fast on a 386.

I also noticed the huge increase in the speed of map generation... now there's something I don't miss about running it on a 386! Kind of reminds me of loading Monopoly from Datasette on the Commodore 64. (i.e. start it up, go have dinner, then come back and see if it's done yet... (nope, it's not... ))

Unit movement and flashing were the same in both architectures.

Interesting... perhaps the internally timed values are optimum (in the programmer's plans) on a faster CPU like the P-90, and were merely forced to slow down on a 386 SX-16. Still, that wouldn't explain why it's slower in windows than dosbox...

 

[void]

another interesting (and annoying) fact:

whenever I alt-tab out of Civ for a while and then come back... the game runs at increased speed for a while. The longer it stays minimized, the longer it takes to return to normal...

 

[simonnomis]

Anyone who is able to run CivDOS on XP but finds it painfully slow:

Select IBM sounds. It will now run at the correct speed. Annoying sounds, but easy gameplay.

 

[Whelkman]

Anyone who is able to run CivDOS on XP but finds it painfully slow:

Select IBM sounds. It will now run at the correct speed. Annoying sounds, but easy gameplay.

Confirmed. Good find! Any theory as to why it works? Some day I'll need to try this in Windows 3.

 

[simonnomis]

Confirmed. Good find! Any theory as to why it works? Some day I'll need to try this in Windows 3.

I can't claim credit for this find... I read about it many years ago when I first started using CivDos on win98, and have stuck to it ever since.

I'm assuming it has something to do with clock cycles and synching... but I'm no expert on the technical side of things.

 

[simonnomis]

I guess I'm just used to the slowness then. In fact, the speediness when using Dosbox was one thing that annoyed me, heh...

But really, the speed it plays at without dosbox is the same speed I remember it playing at in the early 90's in DOS, and in the Amiga version... I wonder, is dosbox speeding it up faster than it ran originally in DOS?

I used to play the Amiga500 version... I don't remember it being any slower than the Amiga1200 version, and that runs at exactly the same speed as CivDOS using options 1-2-1 or DosBox. The Amiga had a seperate GPU so CPU clock-speed was not really relevant with a low graphics programme like Civ.

Don't you find using options 1-1-1 it takes forever when you have quite a few units on the board?