At 1/12/06 01:25 PM, xlaw42 wrote:
This has 2 reasons, #1 for the function and the other is for the knowledge
I want to play some DOS games on my computer, but the command prompt seems to run really messed up and cut games off whenever it feels like.
What i am curious about.. is there a way you can run a windowed 16 bit game on windows XP...
WowExec is the 16-bit emulator for Windows XP
so 16-bit apps runs fine.
The 2 ideas i was thinking about is there already being a program that emulates 16 bit on windows xp
^^
The other idea was taking a partition and putting windows 98 on it.. than somehow running boths OS at the same time...
As the other dude mentioned, you have Dosbox for old games.
It is also possible to set up the command prompt to run older games, if you get all the drivers you need.
The primary reason why old games started working when people got winnt, win2k, winxp etc, is that DOS is no longer a part of Windows, as it used to be in the Win9x platform. You don't actually have a problem with 16-bit apps, you have a problem with DOS applications. DOS had another method of handling drivers and system configuration. Even though you might see similarities in some parts of the newer windows versions, this is just superficial. The Windows NT kernel (yes, both windows 2000 and windows XP uses the NT kernel (2000 is NT 5.0 and XP is NT 5.01))
Windows NT runs in what you call a protected environment, meaning that applications are under heavy "surveillance". This is why you sometimes get the message "This application has caused an illegal operation" or "The memory could not be 'read' at 0xCDCDCD" or "The memory could not be 'written' at 0x000000" etc.
DOS was not protected, an application had the same rights as a driver, meaning you could overwrite the kernel memory, causing the system to freeze.
Leading to my point; old dos games was alot more "complex" than newer applications, because they managed alot of the resources themselves, like interrupts, DMA's etc, which is not allowed in Windows XP.
Only drivers are allowed to make low-level calls.
This is generally why DOS applications either make the command prompt freeze or close.
I myself, run DosBox, although there is one thing that bugs me with it.
It is primarily created to run REALLY old games, which were created at a time where the internal clock wasn't good enough to use to "clock" games at certain frequencies, so they just relied on the computer being "just perfect" for their game. So with faster computers, you got faster games. So in DosBox, you have a forced "downclock" which I want to be optional, because I need to run some old games that require CPU (A Pentium 200 would be nice) like Syndicate Wars.