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?

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?

On 3/8/12 8:24 AM, 98 Guy wrote:
Why is this so hard for people to do?

Because the majority of users, even in the Win98 and earlier days,
didn't even know how to do it. :-)



--
Ken

Mac OS X 10.6.8
Firefox 10.0.2
Thunderbird 10.0.2
LibreOffice 3.5.0 rc3

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

"Industrial One" wrote in message
...
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?


Name of the Game would help....

You have to go in to Command Prompt in Full Screen,
And Compatibility modes have to be Set to that game OS,
and you have the set the Buffer Size,
and the Number of buffers for that Game..




--
This post contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.
Without proper rendering support,
you may see question marks, boxes,
or other symbols instead of Unicode characters.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Okay so either boot into DOS or use a VM, which one would result in
faster performance? I'll assume DOS.

So I download DOS 7.1, then what? Do I have to install this on a thumb
drive to boot from it, and then do I cd to the directory with the
program I wanna run?

The program is not a game, btw. It's an emulator that runs ROMs
(games). Emulating an emulator with DOSBox was... an apalling
experience. Vegan hackers would probably nail me to a cross for
wasting so much energy.

On Mar 8, 3:24*pm, 98 Guy wrote:
Why is this so hard for people to do?

Because I have no floppy drive.

On 3/8/12 10:06 AM, Industrial One wrote:
Okay so either boot into DOS or use a VM, which one would result in
faster performance? I'll assume DOS.

I would guess DOS, but if you were to use a VM, you could XP and DOS at
the same time. And with VM, you could install real DOS, and maybe the
real game would run. I'm not a gamer, but I know some games do funny
things.

I also suspect your XP machine is far faster than an original DOS box,
you may not even notice a speed problem.

Since Virtual Box is free, if you don't like it, you can delete it and
not be out any money.

I know of no reason you couldn't load DOS 7.1 into Virtual Box.

So I download DOS 7.1, then what? Do I have to install this on a thumb
drive to boot from it, and then do I cd to the directory with the
program I wanna run?

The program is not a game, btw. It's an emulator that runs ROMs
(games). Emulating an emulator with DOSBox was... an apalling
experience. Vegan hackers would probably nail me to a cross for
wasting so much energy.

On Mar 8, 3:24 pm, 98 wrote:
Why is this so hard for people to do?

Because I have no floppy drive.

You can buy an external USB floppy pretty cheap.


--
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).