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Neeum Zawan <m.n### [at] ieee org> wrote:
> I'd love to see what happens if I boot MS-DOS on my P4 2.53 GHz. How
> will it handle my video card? RAM? I suppose that 640K thing is there,
> but what if I want to use stuff like smartdrv and access higher memory?
You'll not run into trouble with *those*:
- Video cards are all still VGA compatible (if only to interface to the BIOS).
- RAM will be 1 MB, minus whatever is occupied by hardware; contiguous memory
will be 640K of course.
- XMS drivers like HIMEM.SYS used Intel's Protected Mode architecture to access
memory above 1 MB; of course the Protected Mode is still there in modern
processors.
However, you forgot one thing that could ruin your day:
.... do you have an old PS/2 keyboard, or is it USB already?
You may also want to think about whether you can access any of the installed
hard drives. NTFS won't do of course, but also FAT32 won't do. Forget LBA mode,
to be DOS-accessible your hard disk partition must be somewhere near the
beginning of the disk and small enough.
To be able to still play around with DOS, on my last computer (Pentium 4, 2GB) I
had installed one of those parallel-IDE-to-CompactFlash adapters, and used an
old 256MB CF card. That, combined with the old PS/2 keyboard and PS/2 mouse,
did the job.
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clipka wrote:
> .... do you have an old PS/2 keyboard, or is it USB already?
I just booted a Windows 98 rescue floppy burned onto a DVD on a USB keyboard
on an x64 machine with 6G of RAM. Worked well enough to bring up a DOS
prompt and "more readme.txt" worked, so it can't be *too* hard.
No, it couldn't see the NTFS drives. :-)
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
"We'd like you to back-port all the changes in 2.0
back to version 1.0."
"We've done that already. We call it 2.0."
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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> I just booted a Windows 98 rescue floppy burned onto a DVD on a USB keyboard
> on an x64 machine with 6G of RAM. Worked well enough to bring up a DOS
> prompt and "more readme.txt" worked, so it can't be *too* hard.
Yeah, Windows 98 did come with integrated USB support already.
I wouldn't expect MS-DOS 6.0 (for instance) to do the same stunt.
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On 07/31/09 20:26, David H. Burns wrote:
> eventually. But one couldn't use the high resolution graphics -- or
> could one??
Sure you could. 1024x768 on Fractint. And some DOS games. Likely not
easy, though.
--
When the lion was given his courage, he promptly ate up the Wizard,
Dorothy, the scarecrow and the tinman.
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On 07/31/09 21:51, clipka wrote:
> However, you forgot one thing that could ruin your day:
>
> .... do you have an old PS/2 keyboard, or is it USB already?
PS/2 (or whatever it's called).
In any case, aren't there adapters to convert USB to PS/2?
Never knew what the benefit of a USB keyboard was...
> You may also want to think about whether you can access any of the installed
> hard drives. NTFS won't do of course, but also FAT32 won't do. Forget LBA mode,
> to be DOS-accessible your hard disk partition must be somewhere near the
> beginning of the disk and small enough.
Along with whether it can handle huge HD's...
--
When the lion was given his courage, he promptly ate up the Wizard,
Dorothy, the scarecrow and the tinman.
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Neeum Zawan <m.n### [at] ieeeorg> wrote:
> On 07/31/09 20:26, David H. Burns wrote:
> > eventually. But one couldn't use the high resolution graphics -- or
> > could one??
> Sure you could. 1024x768 on Fractint. And some DOS games. Likely not
> easy, though.
One of the major problems nowadays in running an old DOS game from DOS
is that you will most probably not get any sound. While display cards still
preserve old VGA compatibility, most soundcards and soundchips have long
ago dropped any SoundBlaster backwards compatibility. And even if that SB
compatibility could be somehow emulated, I bet you would have to fine-tune
those environment variables settings for hours before you get anything.
(I bet you will never get it working.)
Also many old DOS games simply crash or hang when run in a modern PC
because modern PCs are so fast that it messes up the timing routines in
those games. The older the game, the more probable that they didn't expect
PCs to become thousands of times faster.
There may also be other minor problems with XP's and Vista's DOS simulation
which may make the game unable to run or unstable.
DOSBox has the advantage that it fully emulates a SoundBlaster card with
all the environment variables already set up correctly, so most if not all
DOS games supporting SB will work out-of-the-box.
--
- Warp
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Neeum Zawan <m.n### [at] ieeeorg> wrote:
> Never knew what the benefit of a USB keyboard was...
Try hot-swapping a PS/2 keyboard and you'll see the benefit.
--
- Warp
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Neeum Zawan wrote:
> On 07/31/09 20:26, David H. Burns wrote:
>> eventually. But one couldn't use the high resolution graphics -- or
>> could one??
>
> Sure you could. 1024x768 on Fractint. And some DOS games. Likely not
> easy, though.
>
>
Yes, I have used that resolution with Fractint, but the computer was
booted up
in Windows (95? 98?).
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Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
> > Never knew what the benefit of a USB keyboard was...
>
> Try hot-swapping a PS/2 keyboard and you'll see the benefit.
How often a day do you do that on your desktop computer? :P
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clipka <nomail@nomail> wrote:
> > Try hot-swapping a PS/2 keyboard and you'll see the benefit.
> How often a day do you do that on your desktop computer? :P
Not often with the keyboard, but I often swap my USB mouse between
my desktop computer and my work laptop. An old PS/2 mouse couldn't be
used like that (and not only because the laptop as no PS/2 port).
--
- Warp
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