In message <WjFrh.78719$%
[email protected]> Charlie Wilkes
Ouch. That sounds a lot more costly then virtualizing, and virtualizing
a small DOS machine will be far less temperamental then simply running
the DOS app under a Win32 environment.
It would be both more costly and prohibitively clunky for anything but a
small office. My conjecture is that the OP owns or works for a small
business, because who else still uses DOS commercially outside of the
device market?
For a small office in which only a few people use the DOS programs, the
main cost would be the KVM switch and some incremental electricity. By
using a KVM switch, the user can toggle back and forth, and thus would not
be running in a (flaky???) virtual environment, or a Win32 environment,
but a real DOS environment. Underpinning this arrangement would be a
network connection so the files on the DOS machine(s) can be read and
accessed within the Windows machines.
I have done this at home. I still like to use NeoPaint, and my experience
with virtual environments is (1) I can only work in a small window
and (2) they dog the CPU.
Maybe Windows Vista will turn out to be a practical and stable host for
legacy Clipper DOS apps in a virtual environment... but, how much does
anyone want to bet on that?
Charlie
