Hey there,
I was just wondering if anyone knew of a emulator that i could download for Win2k or XP. A DOS emulator, i am wanting to play some games and they won't work, course they are a bit older, but i would still like to play them. If anyone can help me out i would apprediate it greatly. Thanks!!!

this is a Linux forum. Try searching somewhere else. download.com tucows.com

You may find a better response at www.pcmech.com forums, but just to let you know I have tried to get several DOS based games to work in w2k, but not very successfully.

You should have something called Windows Compatability Mode in XP or 2k. This is supposed to allow your old games to work. I had a mixed response and in the end gave up and installed win98. If you have a copy of 98 then reformat you HD, install 98, then install 2k after and it will pick it up and you can have both. 98 is perfect for those DOS games! I'm not sure, but you could also try FreeDos. Not sure what the website is though.

i think you can use a boot disk to get into dos that's how I do it with windows ME

In win2k you can right click on your program, or shortcut, go to properties and have it run under windows 95, or 98 compatibilty mode. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

Normally, I would tell you to go to a DOS/Windows forum, but I know the answer to this question.

You can find shells, both DOS and BASH that work with Windows, but DOS based games will not run because the OS architecture is very different.

DOS, 95, 98, and ME allows games to access hardware directly, bypassing the kernel. This is why those particular OS are unstable. NT, 2K, and XP dont allow that, which is why they are more stable, at least as good as Windows seems to get.

This is also why it is difficult to play games on emulated Windows environments using Linux as the host. Linux does not allow direct hardware control either, and getting to emulate that is very difficult. Even the DOS emulator on Luinux does not play games for that reason.

Sorry, but there is no way around it. If you must have your games, you should install one of those DOS based operating systems.


Hope that explains things for ya.

So to twist what you are saying, DOS is one of the reasons for the early unstable versions of windows(ie 95, 98, ME)?

But DOS games are the best going! (and I aint jokin)

Crag,

DOS itself was not horribly unstable in its earlier days. Even Windows, when you are not running games, (or extensions of it, such as ActiveX) is not that bad.

But when games came around, it was easier to program and gave faster response times to allow the game to access the hardware resource at the same time the OS is. When this started happening, bad code on both sides couased HUGE instability problems.

Remember how Linux kernel architecture is designed? All programs are processes and threads, with the kernel watching them. The kernel also assigns interrupts to the available system resources. When one of these processes goes bad, the kernel intervenes and will hang its call, or crash the app down to prevent system compromise.

This is why DOS games cannot run on Linux, 2K, NT,and XP.... without the kernel being able to intervene in case of a bad process... then that process could send a bad call to the hardware, the kernel sees it also and gets confused and BAM! You crash harder than rock out a 3 story window.

I hope this helps further explain what I was saying.

BTW- Yes, I still have many DOS based games, and they do rule. My favorite even though it is old is Descent 3! Right now though I am hooked on Unreal. (I have alot of anger at my boyfriend, soI need to let it out somehow )

Yeah, i'm going to try it!

Dosbox is the emulator you are looking for:

http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/news.php?show_news=1

works with Linux, Windows, Xbox... you name it. Performance-wise can be very, very slow, specially if you don't have a very fast machine. Anything less then a 1.0Ghz for games like Alone in the Dark will be really slow.

Regards!

You could try installing Qemu and then installing an old Windows, DOS or FreeDOS in a virtaul machine. Probably not the most ideal solution but it might work for ya. And some DOS games are cool, Full Throttle is insane...

This question was asked in 2002. Post dated 12th, 2002 09:46

Wonder if the OP is still watching this thread

Hexen and Hexen II for me...

The best way to go is : Grab an old PC or laptop for a few bucks and install DOS on it exclusively.
I have an old Pentium I-120MHz Laptop with 1.2G HD and 80MB of RAM dedicated to my old DOS-games. (Running DR-DOS 7.03 , which is free for personal use)
Speaking of overkill.......