Running an old DOS program

I am not a Win98 user, I use XP, but I'm crossposting to the 98 group
because if there's anyone that would know about running old programs
on modern machines, I hope it to be you guys.

I was told that legacy DOS drivers are no longer made for modern mobos
as of like 5 years ago, but I constantly hear about nostalgic mofos
finding workarounds.

I do have a workaround which is DOSBox but it greatly slowed down the
performance. Indeed, only a weird mother****er like me would go out my
way to emulate an EMULATOR and expect the FPS to be smooth. Its ironic
when I think that on the original platform it runs perfectly on 4 MHz
and my 3 GHz i7 can't run it in full FPS.

So yeah, any way to run my program natively or at least a way faster
than running it through DOSBox?

On Thu, 8 Mar 2012 05:59:55 -0800 (PST), Industrial One
wrote:

I am not a Win98 user, I use XP, but I'm crossposting to the 98 group
because if there's anyone that would know about running old programs
on modern machines, I hope it to be you guys.

I was told that legacy DOS drivers are no longer made for modern mobos
as of like 5 years ago, but I constantly hear about nostalgic mofos
finding workarounds.

I do have a workaround which is DOSBox but it greatly slowed down the
performance. Indeed, only a weird mother****er like me would go out my
way to emulate an EMULATOR and expect the FPS to be smooth. Its ironic
when I think that on the original platform it runs perfectly on 4 MHz
and my 3 GHz i7 can't run it in full FPS.

Welcome to the world of Windows.

So yeah, any way to run my program natively or at least a way faster
than running it through DOSBox?

Dual boot system, or find a way to boot to DOS (thumb drive, CD/DVD,
....)

On Mar 8, 3:01*pm, pedro wrote:
On Thu, 8 Mar 2012 05:59:55 -0800 (PST), Industrial One

wrote:
I am not a Win98 user, I use XP, but I'm crossposting to the 98 group
because if there's anyone that would know about running old programs
on modern machines, I hope it to be you guys.

I was told that legacy DOS drivers are no longer made for modern mobos
as of like 5 years ago, but I constantly hear about nostalgic mofos
finding workarounds.

I do have a workaround which is DOSBox but it greatly slowed down the
performance. Indeed, only a weird mother****er like me would go out my
way to emulate an EMULATOR and expect the FPS to be smooth. Its ironic
when I think that on the original platform it runs perfectly on 4 MHz
and my 3 GHz i7 can't run it in full FPS.

Welcome to the world of Windows.

So yeah, any way to run my program natively or at least a way faster
than running it through DOSBox?

Dual boot system, or find a way to boot to DOS (thumb drive, CD/DVD,
...)

Elaborate. What tools must I download, what steps must I take?

On 3/8/12 8:01 AM, pedro wrote:
On Thu, 8 Mar 2012 05:59:55 -0800 (PST), Industrial One
wrote:

I am not a Win98 user, I use XP, but I'm crossposting to the 98 group
because if there's anyone that would know about running old programs
on modern machines, I hope it to be you guys.

I was told that legacy DOS drivers are no longer made for modern mobos
as of like 5 years ago, but I constantly hear about nostalgic mofos
finding workarounds.

I do have a workaround which is DOSBox but it greatly slowed down the
performance. Indeed, only a weird mother****er like me would go out my
way to emulate an EMULATOR and expect the FPS to be smooth. Its ironic
when I think that on the original platform it runs perfectly on 4 MHz
and my 3 GHz i7 can't run it in full FPS.

Welcome to the world of Windows.

So yeah, any way to run my program natively or at least a way faster
than running it through DOSBox?

Dual boot system, or find a way to boot to DOS (thumb drive, CD/DVD,
...)

Another option to consider is to use virtual machine software on your XP
computer.

MS has/had two versions of their own VM software. They are free.

VM Fusionware and Parallels have VM software you have to pay for.

Virtual Box is free and open source.

The advantage of VM software is, depending on unknowns at my end, you
can use just about any OS you want. You should be able to even install
DOS. I use Parallels for the Mac, and have XP Pro and Vista Ultimate
installed. Doesn't work perfectly, but updates keep coming out. I also
have a Win box multiboot with the same OS's installed, plus a Win 7 box.
I'm not a big Windows user anymore, but have them for my own enjoyment
and to help my Win owning friends.

--
Ken

Mac OS X 10.6.8
Firefox 10.0.2
Thunderbird 10.0.2
LibreOffice 3.5.0 rc3

pedro wrote in news:a3ihl79arj9ut2k6s7f175akr5cquc8lgq@
4ax.com:

On Thu, 8 Mar 2012 05:59:55 -0800 (PST), Industrial One
wrote:

I am not a Win98 user, I use XP, but I'm crossposting to the 98 group
because if there's anyone that would know about running old programs
on modern machines, I hope it to be you guys.

I was told that legacy DOS drivers are no longer made for modern mobos
as of like 5 years ago, but I constantly hear about nostalgic mofos
finding workarounds.

I do have a workaround which is DOSBox but it greatly slowed down the
performance. Indeed, only a weird mother****er like me would go out my
way to emulate an EMULATOR and expect the FPS to be smooth. Its ironic
when I think that on the original platform it runs perfectly on 4 MHz
and my 3 GHz i7 can't run it in full FPS.

Welcome to the world of Windows.

So yeah, any way to run my program natively or at least a way faster
than running it through DOSBox?

Dual boot system, or find a way to boot to DOS (thumb drive, CD/DVD,
...)

I simply use a dos6.22 or 7.xx(win98) bootfloppy,
dos 6.22 simply ingnores the ntsf or fat32, and has a secondairy
fat16 partition on drive 2, which it recognizes as drive C.
That way Xp can manage files on that partition, and dos has
full use of the computer(after reboot).
A dos7.xx floppy recognizes the first partition on
drive 2(fat32) nicely as drive c.
Of course you need a floppy or a bootable usb stick.
The only problem I had with this solution, is that the graphics
cards/monitors mowadays have very few legal vga modes,
some only 640*480(16 cols).

Sjouke Burry s@b wrote in
2.10:

I simply use a dos6.22 or 7.xx(win98) bootfloppy,
dos 6.22 simply ingnores the ntsf or fat32,

I did that, but on a 15 MB partition at the end of the first disk, in a dual-
boot using Scorpius. It also has a Datalight network stack and FTP. I ended
up not using it a lot, but it boots like lightning on the occasions when I
do. It has long filename support. Adding NTFS support is possible, but write
access isn't free. Most of its 15 MB is unused, I just let it have that much
because it was a neat leftover from some slice-sizing calculations.

Sjouke Burry s@b wrote in
2.10:

The only problem I had with this solution, is that the graphics
cards/monitors mowadays have very few legal vga modes,
some only 640*480(16 cols).



Windows (98, anyway) has that limit too, natively. Allegedly it should manage
800x600x16 too, with the same core support (native SVGA driver), but it won't
work for me. Maybe that's a monitor limitation but doubtful given that once a
full Windows install is built with video driver added, it can do it.

(Technically anything above 640x480 isn't VGA anyway, and according to
Wikipedia the picture is a whole lot more complicated than the usually
assumed SVGA=800x600 and 1024x768, and XVGA=1280x1024 and perhaps 1600x1200,
before all hell breaks loose in so many new formats that it starts to look
silly.)

Lostgallifreyan wrote in
:

Sjouke Burry s@b wrote in
2.10:

The only problem I had with this solution, is that the graphics
cards/monitors mowadays have very few legal vga modes,
some only 640*480(16 cols).



Windows (98, anyway) has that limit too, natively. Allegedly it should
manage 800x600x16 too, with the same core support (native SVGA
driver), but it won't work for me. Maybe that's a monitor limitation
but doubtful given that once a full Windows install is built with
video driver added, it can do it.

(Technically anything above 640x480 isn't VGA anyway, and according to
Wikipedia the picture is a whole lot more complicated than the usually
assumed SVGA=800x600 and 1024x768, and XVGA=1280x1024 and perhaps
1600x1200, before all hell breaks loose in so many new formats that it
starts to look silly.)


Well, on my old computers i use svgacc.lib for graphics
in C and fortran, and i have 16, 256, and rgb color available,
and all without special drivers( et4000 and et6000 xvga cards).
It is downright disappointing to see a "mode not supported" square
floating across the screen.
Tried to load vesa software support on my XP, but that did not
improve things.
Back to my old computers....(60 Mhz pentium2,xvga vesa support and
ethernet package driver support, ISA video grabber and 8 channel 12 bit
ado, 4channel dao).
PS: I have to dump a few of those old machines, running out of space...
But nice for spareparts.

Sjouke Burry s@b wrote in
. 10:

Well, on my old computers i use svgacc.lib for graphics
in C and fortran, and i have 16, 256, and rgb color available,
and all without special drivers( et4000 and et6000 xvga cards).
It is downright disappointing to see a "mode not supported" square
floating across the screen.


But that's like my laser scanner on a sound card, where its WDM driver can
set exact 50000 (or 60000, even 90000) samples per second to emulate an ILDA
standard for a fast galvo scanner. But I could only justify the expense of
'Widemoves' that only do maybe 18000 points (or samples) per second. I can
have slightly faster, at narrower scan angle, which is directly analogous to
higher VDU refresh at smaller resolutions, a compromise most us are familiar
with.

In short, there's a lot of difference between driver and hardware capability.
I guess if drivers had ways to spot video performance and scale back when
they see degradation, any number of things may have worked better, but I
don't think it ever happened. But it would be frustrating to be denied what
we know damn well should work.

If drivers could take settings as freely as we can assign sizes and colours
to bitmaps, we'd be ok, but I think the makers didn't want the complexity or
the risk of people burning out raster scan drive transistors, then blaming
the supplier for the freedom they got to hang themselves with. All
changing now with DVI-D and TFT LCD pixels, but old habits die hard...

Industrial One wrote:

I was told that legacy DOS drivers are no longer made for modern
mobos as of like 5 years ago,

It's my impression that the only "DOS" drivers that really keep hanging
on or keep showing up on the driver CD of new motherboards are for the
integrated network (ethernet) ports. Same also for PCI ethernet cards.

I can't really say that I've ever seen DOS drivers lately for other
aspects of the guts of your typical PC (such as chipset, sound, video,
usb, etc).

Normally the system BIOS can supply DOS with all it needs to interact
with the video system (at least up to VGA 640 x 480 mode), com ports,
IDE and even SATA controllers and attached drives, keyboard and mouse,
etc. USB under DOS has always been a questionable issue - but given
your handle (Industrial One) I would suspect that you wound't have much
interest or need in USB functionality under DOS.

Something that would affect the situation drastically for DOS on modern
motherboards is the change from the traditional BIOS to some new form of
bios that I hear is coming out (or is already out) on some bleeding-edge
motherboards (I forget what it's called).

Oh - you should have cross-posted this to some DOS groups, because
Windows 98 is not really a DOS-based operating system. It is a win32 OS
that just happens to get boot-strapped or started from a DOS-mode
state. Win-98 puts the CPU into 32-bit protected mode and offers a
virtual DOS environment for any 16-bit apps that need it. Win-2k and XP
does the same thing, and I think so does Vista. Windows 7 (I think)
does not offer a virtual DOS environment.

I'm adding comp.os.msdos.programmer to the distribution of this thread
(it seems to be the most active "DOS" group).

but I constantly hear about nostalgic mofos finding workarounds.

You can take pretty much any motherboard made even today and boot and
run DOS on it, regardless what sort of hard-drive you attach to the
system. There is nothing nostalgic about that.

What you might or should find nostalgic is seeing any win-9x/me drivers
for modern hardware.

You seem to be equating win-9x/me to DOS in terms of drivers or
hardware, and that would be a false equation.

I do have a workaround which is DOSBox but it greatly slowed down
the performance.

So yeah, any way to run my program natively or at least a way
faster than running it through DOSBox?

Booting a moderm motherboard with DOS is easily possible. Why haven't
you tried that?

Go out and do a search for "DOS 7.1" and download it from the web some
where. Put it on a floppy disk and take it to your desired or target
machine and boot it with the floppy. Attach a hard drive to the machine
and run fdisk and format from the floppy and format the hard drive so
that it will boot into DOS all by itself. Copy all the files and
software you have from your windoze PC to this DOS pc using what-ever
means you can (floppy disks, burned onto a CD, etc).

Why is this so hard for people to do?