MS-DOS emulation for windows 98?

[Cybergoth]

Hi there!

 

Maybe a rather strange request, but what I'm looking for is some sort of an emulation of a MS-DOS environment for Windows '98.

 

The problems I have is that I don't get "Battle Bugs", a '94 DOS game running anymore.

 

First it didn't have enough memory, but after discarding the "keyb" from the Autoexec.bat it started. It now freezes after entering the copy protection code. That is in a plain W98 DOS Box.

 

If I boot in MS-DOS right away, the game bails out complaining about finding no mouse driver... Gee. It's been almost a decade that I last dealt with crap like that. How do I get a DOS mouse-driver running when booting W98 in MS-DOS mode?

 

Best would be some MS-DOS emulation, which'd provide lot's of this 640K base mem, and has mouse & sound & vesa & every other driver ready to use...

Is there something like that available?

 

Greetings,

Manuel

[Nukey Shay]

You have two choices. You can create a shortcut to the game and edit it to emulate the memory types needed (go into the properties)...or you can create a boot disk using an old MsDos 6.2 install disk (which is just a little bit dangerous). When using the second method, you must make sure that the install disk does not attempt to do it's scandisk portion. That can wreck havok with Win98 directory structures. Simply boot it and exit to disk, then format a system disk (FORMAT A: /S). The next step is that the program must reside on the first 2gb portion of a hard disk partition. This can be a little tricky to set up...but not impossible. The way that I get around this dilemma is that I have a 700mb partition that I use for burning CD's...and simply copy in the old app when I want to run it. With a 6.2 boot disk, I can set up config to do whatever the app requires. If you are using USB devices, you might be out of luck. Config, himem, mouse drivers, etc., can be written to the boot disk with room to spare. With everything loaded into UMB's, you can free up almost all of the base memory (leaving roughly an 18kb footprint IIRC).

 

In either case, you will probably need to get a program called MoSlo (or one like it), which can filter down the blistering speeds of current processors to something more in tune with a 486 machine.

[Cybergoth]

Hi there Nuckey!

 

Thanks for your tips!

 

After some more experimenting, I have the game running now -

 

BUT: It only works with "Internal Speaker" as sound option. I tried all sound blaster options and checked for a correct "SET BLASTER" string, but there's no way to get that going with my sound card.

 

Any further ideas to solve that?

 

Greetings,

Manuel

[Nukey Shay]

Well, there is no clear-cut solution to that (since the game was written for the PC speaker). You could remix the PC speaker beeps through your soundcard (if it supports that)...but you would still need to open the case and unplug the physical speaker to silence it as well. If you wanted to kill it completely, there's a TSR called MUTE100 that will intercept all beeps (but I dunno if it would intercept beeps being mixed in the soundcard as well...it probably would kill those too). You can find it HERE.

 

You may also be able to disable the speaker in BIOS, or disable it in your Windows hardware settings (if Win is running in the background)...but both of those options would kill the beeps even when you aren't playing the game...as well as killing any chance of remixing the sound through your soundcard.