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someone can run old dos demos on Win XP & Win 2K ? =)

well, someone probably can.. but not me, that's for sure 8) the main problem with win2k's 'interesting' implementation of dos virtual machine is sound (as far as I know).. old soundless dos 4ks/512bs/etc mainly work fine tho.

damn, it's time for a msdos emulator :)

...one that has 'balls-on' support for sb16 & gus for that matter, not to mention a selectable clockspeed to overcome pascal bugs. aaahhh...=)

win2k and xp are, to my experience, quite coherent on the matter: they support old stuff haphazardly. some machines can run *reeaally* old shit with no flaws, others just crash in an awful manner.

I messed about with a program called 'Virtual PC' that allowed you to install a 'virtual pc' on windows. It's ok, but I didn't get to view the demos I wanted due to oddness in it's ability to understand interrupts and handle vesa. (It didn't, and scitech display doctor messed it all up.)

So yes, it's time for a dos emulator to be coded (:

Have anybody tried out with vmware?

I wouldn't dare try any demo on vmware. It emulates *everything*, including the video buffer. That should result in crawling fps...

Also, it only emulates a pityful Sound Blaster, so many demos requiring a gus still won't work...

hehe buy a gus dudes !!!
i bought one some months ago on ebay, i really don't regret it =)
now my dos emulator is a dos booting floppy disk ..

You know that's NOT a bad idea. After all, it's DOS, right?

Anyone tried Bochs? I can run some old dos games and intros sans sound... the Adlib sound works.. SB in theory works, but very very picky!

why don't you simply use win98 ? I wonder why everyone's whining about XP or 2000 being sooooo stable and cool. my system is nicely running without any problems. or simply install plain DOS on another partition. in days of 100+ GB hdd's I think you can easily "waste" 1GB for another partition

ofcourse it wont run most dosbased crap idiot
and if you cant figure out why, get a book about the nt architecture and the dos one :)

I use pure DOS. Yay.

..at least, I do on one machine. I've got another running win98, heh.

In response to some stuff posted earlier (as opposed to responding to stuff that hasn't been posted yet):

- VMWare and Virtual PC have trouble running demos. Although both VESA and SB-support works, it's creaksome at best. Most demos refuse to run or randomly crash halfway through.

- In theory all DOS demos that don't really require any specific VESA or soundcard-access should work. However, Win2000/WinXP does not allow direct access to the HW so VESA and SB stuff won't work, period. Also, DOS demos that are coded crappily will also just crash due to the improved memory protection of the OS.

So there.

on the GUS - do you have 2 soundcards in the machine, and the GUS selected for DOS thru some interrupt magic, or just the GUS? I'd kinda hate to force the sound thru a GUS for modern demos, in that it's not 64 bit and all.

I have both a GUS PnP and a Hercules Fortissimo 2 in my comp. If you have a non-pnp-GUS (classic/ace/max), windows won't even notice it's there, and if you have the PnP-version, just shut down the PnP-mode (only jumper on the card).

Then you just make a simple windows bootmenu, or a bootdisk which loads ultrinit and sets envvars.

I miss DOS. :,(

A bootdisk is not a half bad idea, though...

It sure would be nice to be able to have a bootloader that could load either Win98 or DOS on the same partition, so you didn't have to worry about file shuffling.
Is that possible, and does it exist?

you mean real dos ? well, this is somehow possible...I think when there was DOS installed before, but don't know exactly. I have a start-menu where I can run the command line of win98, but this works fine, too. not "real" dos, but anyway.
I'll buy a second hdd soon and then I'll have partitions for: win98, win95, dos and linux =))) (everything bootable)

I don't think the main problem will be the OS, but the total lack of ISA ports on the newer mainboards. And we all know that GUS cards are ISA-only... :( Or aren't they? I hope I'm wrong...

yes, they are. the solution to this problem is to get an old 486/pentium. most of us prolly has one in the basement anyway (I got 4).
after all, running old demos on an athlon 1400 kinda ruin the point :)

my board still has an ISA port. it's a DFI one. and there's also some other company (forgot the name) who always have an ISA slot on their latest boards. you just have to search a bit. I think some company could own alot of money by still making boards with 2 ISA ports =)) as long as there are some with 1, it's o.k.
but as log00ber said...who doesn't have some old machine around ? =))

For anyone interested... http://ntvdm.cjb.net . It is a SB16 emulator for DOS under NT/2k/XP, and works great. I can use Impulse Tracker fine under XP or 2K, and run some (not all though) demos with no problems.

It's a bit slow, so you better have a good machine (or set up a big buffer, but that'll lead to a lot of delay in the sound).

Greetz

styx: yes, it's weird, i also found an Abit board with a single ISA slot, i think it's K7TE or sg like that. However, since ISA slots slow down PCI connections very much, i fear that ISA slots will soon vanish...

And about the old PCs... Try running Zilog :)
(I have a 486 too, but it's a laptop, so methinks it will be rather complicated to hack in a GUS, especially because there's no serial port version... :)

gargaj: actually also your pci stuff can slow down things. just take those sb512 or whatever soundcards. most of their "great" features are done in software, and that slows down really. so I better have my sb16 isa.