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Virtual PC
| Virtual PC, DOS & Running DOS GamesYou might be one of those boring stiffs with an 18 year old accounting package that needs to be run under DOS, and you want to set up Virtual PC for it. That is easy. You might be an avid PC gamer with many old, but great, DOS games, and want Virtual PC so you can run them The good news is that Virtual PC provides an identical operating environment under DOS: a very standard VGA card the S3 Trio, a very standard soundcard the Soundblaster 16 and of course CDROM drives, mouse and so on. Besides providing universally compatible hardware, using Virtual PC allow you to use a "real" version of DOS, not the strange, stripped down version under Windows. Installing DOS 6.2 (or any version up to)Installation is simple: set up a virtual machine under Virtual PC, then set your virtual machine to capture either "Drive A:" or an image of your first DOS setup disk. Reset (reboot) the virtual machine. Follow your DOS setup instructions. Be sure and install the virtual machine additions. They can be found by running your virtual machine, then selecting the menu items Action->Install or Update Virtual Machine Additions and following the instructions. Note that I've elected to not use smartdrive.exe under DOS; this is a file cache system that seems unnecessary on today's hardware. The following examples would be for a DOS installation that was installed in the directory "C:\DOS". Even though MS DOS is many years old, and not sold anymore (I think), it is still the property of Microsoft which means that you must have a licensed version. I have my old install disks from days gone by, part of being a packrat, but otherwise you'll have to scour the net to find them (try eBay) unless you have friends with an old copy they can give you. If you don't have a Microsoft version of DOS, you can also try FreeDOS from www.freedos.org. You can also follow links on this page for its setup. Note that "Folder Sharing" will work under DOS, but I had trouble setting it up in DOS 6.22 with emm386.exe support -- ironically it works properly under FreeDOS. But I package everything I need on an ISO image anyway, so the loss of emm386.exe is no big deal in exchange for access to all my old favorite games. config.sysYou will almost certainly want to install emm386.exe to provide extended memory for your more demanding DOS games. You will also need to install a CDROM driver. Here is a sample config.sys file that will give you the basics:
Note the line "DEVICE=C:\DOS\CDROM.SYS /D:IDECD001 /L:E": the actual file "CDROM.SYS" is the CDROM driver; its name may be different for different versions of DOS. The cryptic "D:IDECD001" identifies the drive letter and a name that can be used later to identify the file. The following settings for emm386 is strongly recommended: DEVICE=C:\DOS\EMM386.EXE RAM I=B100-B7FF I=C600-C7FF I=CC00-CFFF I=E600-EFFF FRAME=D000 autoexec.batThe autoexec.bat file should at a minimum set up a mouse, the CDROM, and provide soundcard settings. The virtual machine additions for DOS does have a mouse driver, however you are not required to use it. The soundcard settings are based on the configuration in Virtual PC, and the CDROM setup is based on the settings in the config.sys file:
What Next?I installed DOS 6.22; the 6.x versions of DOS came with a utility called "memmaker.exe" which is used to optimize so-called "lower" memory to give your application more room. Run this! You might remember that some of your DOS games needed a lot of tweaking to get running. Fortunately the virtual machine is an ideal computer for DOS, and almost everything can be made to run with little effort. If you don't have memmaker, try adding commands to load drivers high. For a config.sys, use DEVICEHIGH instead of DEVICE, and for autoexec.bat add LH in front. For example:
This should free up enough low memory.
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Copyright 2006 InfomythTM |
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again. Or maybe you can get them to run under Windows XP, but can't get the sound card, the mouse or the video card to run properly...