hi all, gog noob here, games run fine on my win 10 i7, but I'm just curious if older dos games would run on an old Pentium 4 winxp 32? so, in other words, do the system specs listed in each game refer to the requirements of the gog dosbox emulation more than the game itself? 3d games would be case by case, but I wanted to run on my retro p4 to take advantage of midi/eax sound.

thoughts?

GoG system requirements are about what you need the game with the GoG installer (including dosbox), so if your P4 is fast enough you shouldn't have any trouble.

Generally a P4 should be able to run all except extremely resource demanding DOS games with dosbox without trouble:
http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Performance

ok, thank you. I'll try it out with specific games...I realize my question was probably too general...worse case, i can always run original games on my 486!

The system requirements listed on the GOG website for a given game are a combination of:

- The actual minimum system requirements necessary to both install the game with GOG's installer or via Galaxy.
- The game's actual technical requirements for CPU/GPU/memory/disk resources.
- The systems to which both GOG and the publisher have tested the GOG release of the game on and officially consider to be a supported operating system/hardware combination.

Individual games may actually work on other operating system versions whether they're listed or not, but generally if a game's store page does not state the game is supported on a given OS or hardware combination then it either will not work, or it might work but is not officially supported so if you have any problems with it you're on your own more or less.

For old DOS era games, from the technical standpoint of the games themselves their hardware technical requirements are quite low and any PC made in the last 17 or more years could theoretically handle them. Whether or not they'll work depends more on whether or not the installer is designed to be compatible with the given system, and whether or not the configuration/tweaking etc. that is installed out of the box might work on that system.

Some people might see an ancient DOS game for example that they know only uses a few megabytes of memory, but on the GOG store page it might state "minimum 1GB of memory required" and not understand this. In these cases, it isn't that the game itself uses 1GB of memory, but rather that GOG supports that game running only on the listed operating systems, and that for proper installation and running of the game on those systems, that much memory is recommended for the smoothest experience. In many cases it wouldn't be a surprise at all if the installation program used hundreds of times more memory than the ancient game itself does. :)

Hope this helps.

Thats what I assumed, thank you for being so detailed. I think i will try them on my P4 XP, if not my Athlon 64, although then I might as well use my main rig. Pretty sure the gog installer would be pointless on a 486 running dos. I haven't used gog much, but I have been very pleasantly surprised by how well calibrated their dosbox client is and how well it "just works" Gog has come a long way since it launched!

You could always try Alchemy or Alchemy Universal with W10.

Some of the old DOS games may be preserved in their original state, and all of the tweaks to make them work may be isolated in the DOSbox configuration. Other games however may have needed to be hacked by the developer or GOG to modify it to work on modern systems, and it is possible that the modifications to make that happen may result in the games no longer being able to work on the systems they were originally designed to run on also.

There are some people who have attempted to copy some of the old DOS games onto an actual old DOS system where they were unable to get the games to work due to the changes needed to make them run on new systems for example. I remember someone being rather upset with GOG about that - but GOG isn't selling nor advertising the games with MSDOS 6.22 compatibility nor compat with 80386 processors, so those people are all on crack IMHO. :oP

(where by "those people" I really mean "that one guy" so to speak) hehe

A P4, running XP is perfectly suitable to run most DOS games under DosBox.

But, as said above, the settings or some changes brought by GOG to make the games smooth on the average system may ruin the experience. Install a separate Dosbox session, a frontend like D-Fend Reloaded, play with the parameters and you should be able to run most of them fine.