Anybody have experience running DOS stuff in XP/2K?

Post by **racketboy** » Sat Sep 09, 2006 7:10 pm

My father in law has a bunch of stuff that he still uses on a 486 running Win3.1 and DOS.
I'm hoping to get the stuff running on a modern machine via a DOS emulator (or something)

Anybody have any experience with this matter?

Post by **TEKWRX** » Sat Sep 09, 2006 7:17 pm

http://dosbox.sourceforge.net

Post by **racketboy** » Sat Sep 09, 2006 7:30 pm

TEKWRX wrote:http://dosbox.sourceforge.net

Yeah I saw that, but it doesn't look very user-friendly (we're talking about a 70+ year old user here)

Actually, I just tried running his main program on my XP box by double-clicking the EXE and it seemed to run fine.
Should this work ok or is he going to run into any unpleasant surprises down the line?
It's basically a music arangement program that he has a lot of music input on. Will file saving and printing still function correctly?

How are products like DOSBox any better?

Would Windows 2000 be any worse off than XP for this type of task?

Post by **retrogamer** » Sat Sep 09, 2006 8:22 pm

I use DOSBox as well and it is the most user friendly DOS emulator I have come across so far. You can just drag and drop the game file you want to run over the emulator icon and it will start the game. In game setup is pretty much straightforward similar to how you would load it on actual hardware. DOSBox is worth a try.

Post by **racketboy** » Sat Sep 09, 2006 8:44 pm

retrogamer wrote:I use DOSBox as well and it is the most user friendly DOS emulator I have come across so far. You can just drag and drop the game file you want to run over the emulator icon and it will start the game. In game setup is pretty much straightforward similar to how you would load it on actual hardware. DOSBox is worth a try.

Well it's not a game, but a music arrangement program.
When you say drag it, do you mean the exe file (or shortcut to the EXE?)

How does it handle USB printers?
The program wants to print to LPT1, which in my case is my acrobat PDF writer which didn't know what to do with the job.

Post by **lordofduct** » Sat Sep 09, 2006 11:26 pm

Dos emulation is built into WinXP... maybe in service pack 1 and above, I can't verify anything lower as I've never used it.

Just got to the folder of the run/exe file and right click it. Click properties and one of the tabs will give you the option to run it emulated under Win 3.1, 95, 98 or ME. It also has a speed setting I believe.

For games it isn't the best thing and you should go DosBox as it has a better control over the speed. But for software that isn't dependant on the speed of the processor (i.e. video rendering stuff like videogames) will do just fine. It all comes down to the fact that those programs were dependant on syncing with your processor and your new hyper speed multi ghz processor you just committing to many commands simultaneousily for the syncing to work.

But as I said, software related stuff usually fairs well... not 100% of the time. But very well.

NO SOUND though; the sound is usually ALWAYS hoaky on the built in emulator if and when it even works at all.