[gwhunter]

I no longer own a dos gaming system. As I went from system to system over the years, having started out with a comador, graduating to 8086, 186, 286, 386, 486, p200, p400, p450, p2 800, p3 1.8, and now this new quad core duel video sli I have encounter and solved many issues with running over a thousand dos based games. But now on this new ms operating system, not sure what to do. It does not allow a "real" dos mode boot. Vista can not and will not boot in true dos mode, just the windowed cmd version of dos. I can not edit and boot under any autoexec.bat's or config.bat's, I can not assign any .bat's to the files, can not choose any dos compatabilities modes, nothing. From what I can tell, I can not run a dos based program on this operating system, let alone overcome the most common 2 errors when running this particular game, which are memory and sound card recognition.

When I run the install.exe, vista just pops up a window that says "This system can not support full screen mode. Click here to close."

When I manually set up the files to run, and execute the orion.exe, I get the ms-dos error most common to this game, "1024 memory not available" Which comes back to why I have always hated Bill Gates operating systems. Even with 3gig of ram, I am stuck dealing with a 1024 byte boot cernal, and now with vista, no way to boot without windows eating it all up and not allowing a clean dos boot configurable by me. Atleast with 98 and xp, I could tell windows to run dos games in dos mode and assign bat files with which to run them and in a window mode. Looks like a whole new ball game with vista. Anyone out there know how to fake out vista and make it run dos programs? I don't have the patience or time to do all the research myself. At some point, some one needs to code a program to run all the old dos games through that interfaces all the old dos code to windows. Something global. Either that, or someone need to re-write the original code to be windows compatible and not need dos at all. Many of the old dos games, such as Ultima or Privateer for instance, base the in-game time passage on the cpu speed of a 386. Any system which runs the game on a faster cpu makes the game unplayable. Like in Ultima, 5 sec after the game is started, you're lying on the ground dead from starvation... or in Privateer, 2 sec after leaving a base, 20 enemy ships blast you out of space before you even know they are in the sector with you. Atleast MOO is turn based, and immune to this problem, but is still noticed in the space combat window where everything happens so fast there is no way to know who shot what as it happened to fast to see. But I have never ever gotten the sound in MOO to work on a system that boots with windows, running the game in windows or through windows sound drivers. If anyone knows a fix to running these old dos games on a modern system please let me know. I don't want to have to go to ebay and buy an old 386 or 486 and set up an old dos system custom for all this. I still own over 1,000 of the original install 5" and 3.5" floppy disks, as well as many of the later cd install's, cd required in drive to play crap. If there really is no fix out there to play these games on a modern system, then what is the point of even being able to download the old games if they can not be ran? Why is someone not re-coding them to run on windows, not dos, then offering that code for download?