DOS Emulation for WinXP

[Starkist]

Where might I find a program that will do this? I remember it being discussed before back in the ZC Forums, but with search disabled I haven't been able to find it.

[Masamune]

i think XP comes with an emulator. doesn't it?

[Menokh]

There isn't much you can do as far as that goes.
There is BOCHS, but I don't know where to get it, and it is very buggy, plus ZC doesn't work in it..
XP was not designed to be DOS friendly. M$ considers DOS to be dead so the refuse to support it anymore.

[fatcatfan]

Well, there are commercial emulators which would work very well, but they are pricey. There is a freeware x86 PC emulator (on which you could install DOS) in the works by the original author of bochs, but I don't think its gotten to the first beta release yet. I can't remember the name of it right now, but I'm pretty sure it was on sourceforge.net. It uses virtualization which means instead of emulating the x86 processor, it just emulates hardware like video cards, sound cards, etc... so it will be a fast running emulator - when it's complete.

Anyway, if you want something free... too bad, I think.

-=[EDIT]=-
Here's pre-compiled boch binaries for Windows: http://www.psyon.org/bochs-win32/

And the other project I mentioned, called plex86: www.plex86.org

One commercial emulator: www.vmware.com
Another: http://www.connectix.com/products/vpc4w.html

[Seigeless]

A good way to get DOS on Win XP without an emulator is to tap the F8 key at startup and select "CMDPMPT VGA". That should get you into a C:\> prompt, with the heading MSDOS. Unfortunately, I think it only works for certain models of hp pavilion comps. :(

[Verbatim]

In chat (about a week ago) someone told me that ZC DOS ran better for them under Win XP than under ME, and better than it would have run under Win 98 as well...

The reason being that XP has software MPU 401 emulation, and their sound card didn't support MPU 401. ZC ran fine for them under XP, and, since MPU 401 is the best midi format that ZC supports, they were able to get better sound under XP.

[Menokh]

Odd. Zelda Classic DOS didn't run in XP for me when I tried it. Well sometimes zelda.exe might start up and might play sound and might actually respond.
I guess alot of it depends on individual configuration an hardware.

[Cloral]

When I ran ZC under XP it ran incredibly slow. I mean, I was running it on a 1.7GHz PC and got half the frame rate I had gotten on my 300MHz PC running Windows 98. So don't tell me XP runs ZC better than 98 does, because it quite simply doesn't.

The one thing I found funny is if you go to the Microsoft web site they have articles about DOS utilities available under XP and they seem to make a big deal about them. So they obviously don't think DOS is dead, they just did a shit job of supporting it because they can't write software worth shit.

[Starkist]

My cousin is getting a new computer this week (P4 1.6 GHz 40MB HD 256MB RAM 64MB Video Memory, puts my computer to shame, yadda yadda...) and it will have WinXP. Besides ZC DOS, which won't be much of a problem because the windows version will be out soon, they have a lot of other old games and programs that use DOS.