Warcraft II in Windowed Mode

[KDub]

So I'm running Warcraft II (Battle.Net Edition) on my Win7 laptop and besides some weird coloring issue with scrolling text for the mission brief it runs great.

But I have two monitors and my laptop is widescreen so I'd rather run it in a window so I can multitask while supply gathering goes on and plus it would look better windowed and not stretched with the huge black borders on the side.

I've tried editing the shortcut with -window (or -w and -windows) and that didn't work and I tried to the program DxWnd which just gives me an error (unable to start remote in-process server). I also can't run it in DosBox since it is a Windows exe with the BNE version.

Anyone have any ideas?

[Hobie-wan]

Are you already running it in XP compatibility mode?

[MrPopo]

I'm fairly certain the game doesn't have a windowed mode. Windowed modes were fairly uncommon at the time; many games were ports of DOS games to use some native Windows calls and additionally running windowed requires more resources than running full screen which PCs at the time didn't have available. If you really want to run windowed then you'd need to snag the DOS version and run DOSBox. Only problem is you'd lose things like group keys.

DxWnd only works for DirectX games and I don't believe War2Bnet was DirectX enabled. I know that Diablo 1 doesn't use DirectX and came out around the same time.

[Zing]

Playing Warcraft II while multi-monitor multi-tasking? Times sure have changed.

[KDub]

Are you already running it in XP compatibility mode?

Yep, it runs fine without it but I tried that just to see if it changed anything.
I know it doesn't do it normally (hell there aren't really any setting at all for the game) but I was hoping for a work around. The DXwnd has a setting for Starcraft/Warcraft II but I just get the error. But then again it may be set up for the DOS version, it was just the only thing I could find.

Hilariously I'm pretty sure that if I installed this on my ubuntu partition and ran it in WINE I could do it in a window.

Since I own a physical copy of the BNE version I was hoping to just use that since it was the most updated and I didn't want to bother dpwnloading a DOS copy.

[Hobie-wan]

Hah, I was just thinking, run a VM and play the game inside of it.