I have heard that WinXP completely got rid of DOS. Cuz I wanted to put my Sega Game Gear Emulator on a new laptop of mine that runs XP. The emulator is “Chasm 0.3”, which is a DOS program. So will XP run it, and if not, is there a Windows Game Gear emulator that you know off?
(I own all my original game gear games taht I have downloaded. My game gear has broken(one button doesn’t work) and lost the AC adaptor. so no legal issues apply here, just askin a question.)
Maybe. Your best bet is to run it in Windows 95 Compatibility Mode (select properties for the shortcut to run the emulator, the “Compatibility” if memory serves.)
I’ve got several emulators including ones for NES and SNES, however they are windows based. I would venture to guess that the DOS version would work, however, I’m sure you can find a windows emulator that will work fine. Just google it up and you’ll find plenty of sites (have fun digging through them :rolleyes:
Meka for Windows is a good Sega Game Gear emulator. It also emulates a few other systems, is freeware, and runs great on my Windows 2000 machine.
WinXP is not based on DOS, like Win95, 98, and ME were. It’s its own OS, like NT and 2000. My understanding is that many old DOS programs would communicate directly with your computer’s hardware, but any real OS would never allow this, so NT/2000/XP provides services that make that game think it’s talking directly to the hardware, but it’s actually having to go through the OS. As a result, graphics performance can suffer. But computers are faster nowadays. I have the impression that most things should work.
It is true that XP (a/k/a NT 5.1) is not based on DOS; it’s based on the NT kernel that Windows 2000 (a/k/a NT 5.0) is also based on. However, NT 4.0 and later all have a “DOS virtual machine” built into them that allow you to run most DOS applications. The ones that will not work are those that require direct access to hardware in manners that the virtual machine does not support. This is a rather small category of programs, mostly really old games.
You may also find that some older games run ridiculously fast because they were written to be run on 8086s with 4.77 MHz clocks, and running them on Pentium IIIs with 2.2 GHz clocks is just way too much faster.
Another option is to run Linux and use dosemu or Wine.
Just out of curiosity (I’m a Mac person myself), could you partition a modern PC’s hard drive and install plain old MS-DOS on a FAT partition and boot from it? What would, let’s say, DOS 5.0 make of modern PC architecture? Any hardware compatibility issues (e.g., display, USB mice and keyboards, etc)? If you cared not in the slightest about printing and a 640 x 480 VGA display was sufficient for DOS games and emulators and whatnot, would that work despite the years of technology advances under the hood?
I assume that when you were done you could reboot, bring up the BIOS, and switchboot to the XP or 2K partition easily enough?
Yep. I’ve got an older machine that I can boot into Windows 98, Linux or DOS. (Actually, I have two separate Windows 98 partitions, but that’s another story.) It was a bit tricky setting it up since some of the OSes want to be in particular places on the hard drive but now that it is running everything is seamless.
The only effect I have ever noticed from the setup is that Scandisk insists on reporting a hard drive size error (I have some partitions hidden from each other) Switching from one OS to the other only requires a reboot. (There is a menu that appears at startup to select which OS to load.) And, there is something amusing about running DOS on a 500 Mhz Pentium not to mention seeing it report over 500 meg of extended/expanded memory. (I even have Windows 3.1 running on it.)
I mainly keep the setup just to run some really old DOS games but, hey, why not?
Oops, missed the part of your question about hardware. I’m running IBM DOS 7.0. It can’t see the DVD drive or any USB devices. (I’m told there is a DOS USB driver somewhere but I’ve never bothered looking for it.) It can see my CD-RW drive and it works fine. A mouse plugged into the mouse port also works. My parallel port printer works but not my USB printer.
The hardest thing to get working was the sound. I couldn’t find any drivers which worked for the sound card that came with my system and I finally just stuck an old Creative Labs sound card in. Windows sees it but I just disabled it in the control panel and use the on-board card there. The only problem is that I now have two sets of sound outputs but I got around that with a switchbox.
To be honest, it was easier to get most things working under DOS than it was to access them from Linux. I still don’t have sound there.
I’ve been told that XP has good DOS emulation, but how well does it work? After all, for a lot of games you often hit the EMS/XMS memory problems, which were a pain to deal with even in Win 95/98 with the DOS enviroment still in. (As for my awful copy of Me, forget it.) Could I load up an old Wing Commander game (1, 2, or Privateer, for examples) which would take a lot of memory, or something that wasn’t so hard on the graphics but still took expanded memory like Master of Orion 1 or Master of Magic?
We now have an XP machine at home, but I haven’t been home long enough with my old DOS games to give it a try. However, this summer, I’m putting in a new hard drive and either going back down to 98SE or up to XP Pro. Good DOS emulation on XP would probably tilt the balance to XP.
I’ve had much more success running legacy applications in DOS emulation in XP than I have ever got from running under Win98.
I had the exact opposite experience of Mangetout. I couldn’t get anything to work with the various compatibility modes of XP. Either it worked in XP right out of the box or it never worked no matter how much I fiddled with it. Most old dos games ran but with no sound, though a couple of them just crashed immediately. In Win98 a lot of software wouldn’t run in a dos box, but it would run if I rebooted into dos (not an option for XP).
There are programs you can download for XP that claim to make sound for dos games work, but none of those that I tried worked either.
YMMV.
I haven’t had any problems running dos games on XP. I’m running the old Ultima games using the emulation utility in XP.
One thing you may need is a program that slows down the speed of the app you’re running. A lot of these old dos programs were created back when a Pentium 80mhz was the “bees-knees,” so running them your 2ghz processor results in gameplay at about 20x normal speed.