DOS games in Vista

[Andy]

I was playing a few old DOS games on my XP PC today. - How will they play
with Vista? - come to think of it will they in fact play on a Vista PC?

Andy.

 

[=?Windows-1252?Q?Scotty=A9?=]

I was playing a few old DOS games on my XP PC today. - How will they play
with Vista? - come to think of it will they in fact play on a Vista PC?

Use Mame...it works fine with Vista

 

[philo]

I was playing a few old DOS games on my XP PC today. - How will they play
with Vista? - come to think of it will they in fact play on a Vista PC?

Andy.

I tried a few dos games and some form win3x and they worked fine.
Though not all dos games will work...chances are if they work with XP, they
will also work with Vista.

NOTE: Some old games use a timing loop and will not work simply because the
CPU is too fast...
any qbasic game can be easily hacked to work with a faster cpu though.

 

[Andy]

Use Mame...it works fine with Vista

You couldn't elaborate on that a bit could you please. - I am just hoping I
can run my (or at least some) DOS Games by just clicking on exe or bat or
pif files in vista and that they will run without any additional downloads -
or is that not possible in vista?

cheers,

Andy.

 

[Andy]

I tried a few dos games and some form win3x and they worked fine.
Though not all dos games will work...chances are if they work with XP,
they
will also work with Vista.

NOTE: Some old games use a timing loop and will not work simply because
the
CPU is too fast...
any qbasic game can be easily hacked to work with a faster cpu though.

I have used a program called cpu killer before in XP to slow down my CPU to
use them types of games:

http://www.cpukiller.com/

Andy.

 

[Justin]

There are more advanced apps to help you out. You can use:

DosBox
http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/news.php?show_news=1

or

Bochs
http://bochs.sourceforge.net/

 

[Rick Rogers]

Hi Andy,

MAME is Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. Basically it's a program that you
can run game machine rom files within.

Support for DOS in Vista is virtually the same as it was in XP, they run
under the NTVDM subsystem.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org

 

[Andy]

Hi Andy,

MAME is Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. Basically it's a program that
you can run game machine rom files within.

Support for DOS in Vista is virtually the same as it was in XP, they run
under the NTVDM subsystem.

Thanks for that.

Andy.

 

[ronald.phillips]

Thanks for that.

Andy.

I wouldn't say the same.
There's a memory limitation to NTVDM in Vista that stops DPMI servers
from using more than 32mb of memory. (Rumour is that this will be
fixed in SP1).
I've also had some trouble with 16bit Windows programs that do not
like Vista's NTVDM.
Finally you have to use XP drivers instead of Vista video drivers if
you want to play DOS games that do not use text video modes.

 

[Jules Bosma]

hi,
I had the same problem with a old dosprogram with works fine in XP.
In Vista the came a error when the program teid to swith to full-screen.

With a Dosemulator http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/download.php?main=1
it works fine, even better than under XP



EggHeadCafe.com - .NET Developer Portal of Choice
http://www.eggheadcafe.com

 

[Andrew McLaren]

i tried them all, but none work with 64 bits. I am so tired of this

64bit os, i cant wait till i get my old xp back. too many programs just
wont run!

16 bit applications cannot run on a 64 bit processor, when the processor is
is 64 bit mode.

This is an aspect of the Intel hardware. It is not determined by the
operating system. The VDM facility of the processor ("Virtual DOS Machine")
just isn't there, when the processor is in 64 bit mode. There's nothing
Windows, or any other operating system, can do to overcome this hardware
limitation. DOS and Win3.x applications cannot run on 64-bit XP, either.

The workaround is to use a x86 emulator which emulates an entire x86
processor, instead of using the physical processor's more efficient VDM.
This is a lot slower, but it does provide a runtime environement for 16 bit
apps.

Microsoft's canonical solution for Vista is to use MS-DOS or Windows 3.x in
Virtual PC, a free download from Microsoft.com:
Virtual PC 2007
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/virtualpc/default.mspx

An alternative especially for DOS games is DosBox:
http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/

But, 64-bit isn't an intrinsic good, in and of itself. If 32-bit Vista is a
better platform for your applications, that's what you should run.

 

[Mike]

Hopefully virtual PC 2007 will do the trick...

It will. I use it to run all kinds of bizarre 16 bit DOS full screen stuff
that won't run in Vista. Vista has no DOS full screen mode - at least mine
doesn't. It appears to be video card and/or driver related. Others say
DOS full screen works for them.

The big advantage is that these DOS full screen apps will run in a window in
VPC in Vista. The apps believe they are running full screen however.

Mike

 

[Andrew McLaren]

The image file c:\DOSBox0.70-win32-installer.exe is valid, but its for a
Hmm, strange - DosBox installed and runs okay on my 64-bit Vista machine.
Here's the URL I downloaded from:
http://superb-west.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/dosbox/DOSBox0.70-win32-installer.exe

Hopefully virtual PC 2007 will do the trick...

But certainly, Virtual PC is also an excellent solution. Note that you will
need to supply your own copy of DOS; Virtual PC only supplies the
"hardware", no operating system is bundled.

Good luck with it,