XP and sound with old apps

[Vic]

Hello!

I have a number of old windows apps (for 3.1/95/98) which have sound but the sound does not play on XP. Example: Random House
Dictionary (not upgradeable) which I LOVE has sound pronunciations which work in Win3.1/95/98/98se but does not work in W2K or XP.
The sound (pronunciation) icon simply does not appear in the app when it starts. There are no errors of any kind, everything else
works fine!

Guess this is puzzling because a fresh install or an old install (which works with the older OS's) yields the same results (no
sound, no sound icon), and I heard XP was suppose to have so much built into it for older software support (compared to W2K).

Any ideas why the sound is not working? Does XP need a sound decompressor manually installed/adjusted? Anything!

TIA
Vic

 

[Malke]

Hello!

I have a number of old windows apps (for 3.1/95/98) which have sound
but the sound does not play on XP. Example: Random House Dictionary
(not upgradeable) which I LOVE has sound pronunciations which work in
Win3.1/95/98/98se but does not work in W2K or XP. The sound
(pronunciation) icon simply does not appear in the app when it starts.
There are no errors of any kind, everything else works fine!

Guess this is puzzling because a fresh install or an old install
(which works with the older OS's) yields the same results (no sound,
no sound icon), and I heard XP was suppose to have so much built into
it for older software support (compared to W2K).

Any ideas why the sound is not working? Does XP need a sound
decompressor manually installed/adjusted? Anything!

Many of those old programs interacted with the soundcard directly. This
is not permitted in Win2K or XP. This is A Good Thing and helps make
the NT-based operating systems far more stable than 3.1/Win9x. If your
programs will not work correctly when run in Compatibility Mode (check
XP's Help & Support for details about that), then they will not run in
XP.

In that case, here are some options:

1. Find new versions of the software that are designed for the XP
operating system.

2. Dual-boot Win98/XP or keep an older computer around running the older
operating system(s).

3. See if the programs will run under virtual machine software such as
VMWare or VirtualPC.

Malke

 

[Michael O]

VDMSound

 

[Vic]

Michael, it looks like VDMSound is made to work in DOS boxes. The dictionary mentioned above is Windows software (GUI), albeit old!

Thanks
Vic
___

 

[Vic]

Hi Malke,

Tried running the software in compatibility modes but no joy. Perhaps you are right in that it may try to access the sound card
directly, wish I knew.

If there are any other ideas for getting the software sound to work I'd like to hear them.

TIA,
Vic
___

 

[Alan]

Hi Malke,

Tried running the software in compatibility modes but no joy. Perhaps you
are right in that it may try to access the sound card
directly, wish I knew.

If there are any other ideas for getting the software sound to work I'd
like to hear them.

TIA,
Vic
___

Did you try contacting the publishers?