Playing Dos based games in XP

  • Thread starter Thread starter Watchman
  • Start date Start date
W

Watchman

Is it possible to play Dos based games through XP? I've got Fantasy
General, which requires extended memory which XP doesn't supply, and
Black & White which will play but with screwed up graphics. Is it
possible to run Dos based games smoothly?
Thank you for your time.

Watchman :)
 
Watchman said:
Is it possible to play Dos based games through XP? I've got Fantasy
General, which requires extended memory which XP doesn't supply, and
Black & White which will play but with screwed up graphics. Is it
possible to run Dos based games smoothly?
Thank you for your time.
Click to expand...


It depends on the game, but many old DOS-based games accessed the hardware
directly, and therefore can *not* run under Windows XP.
 
You could also multi-boot DOS + XP and avoid any limitations at all. DOS
games should be played under DOS for best results, one would assume (then
again, maybe the emulators have some advantages too, beats me). If it were
me, I'd download an appropriate version of DOS from http://www.bootdisk.com,
install a boot manager, then install DOS and all my games under it.

Jim
 
Actually, I would download a trial copy of Virtual PC 2004 and install DOS
there and try that first. Multibooting DOS and XP requires reinstalling XP
on a new partition. DOS cannot go just anywhere on the disk.

--
Colin Barnhorst [MVP Windows - Virtual Machine]
(Reply to the group only unless otherwise requested)
Jim said:
You could also multi-boot DOS + XP and avoid any limitations at all. DOS
games should be played under DOS for best results, one would assume (then
again, maybe the emulators have some advantages too, beats me). If it
were
me, I'd download an appropriate version of DOS from
http://www.bootdisk.com,
install a boot manager, then install DOS and all my games under it.

Jim
Click to expand...
 
Colin Barnhorst said:
Actually, I would download a trial copy of Virtual PC 2004 and install DOS
there and try that first. Multibooting DOS and XP requires reinstalling XP
on a new partition. DOS cannot go just anywhere on the disk.
Click to expand...

Well..., yeah..., of course, I realize it's not push a button and magic
happens, I figured if the OP was interested, THEN I would provide more
details, wanted to keep it short and sweet until then.

But yes you will need to place DOS before XP (because DOS must load within
the first 2GB and is limited to FAT/FAT16 and 2GB max size). But that's a
trivial matter, you can use just about any partition manager to reduce the
size of the XP partition (assuming it's consuming all of the HD), and
install MS-DOS in a 2GB max FAT partition at the head of the drive. Now use
a boot manager that that hides each OS from the other, and you're done. No
need to reinstall XP, none at all. It's just a simple repositioning of the
OS partitions and using the boot manager to hide them (which is always the
case), no big deal.

OTOH, if you rely on the Windows boot loader, which is a piece of crap, then
yeah, you have some problems. It FORCES you to reinstall XP, which is why
many of us avoid it like the plague.

JMTC

Jim
 
Back
Top