[Eagle of Fire]

To put it in short I'm sick and tired of making concessions because I'm trying to stick the square peg in the round hole. I'm sick of games that don't have music or glitch because they were never meant to be run in this OS. You're right a lot of games will run well in XP. Many will run almost OK and I'm tired of it.

The two specifically I'm into right now are Mechwarrior 2 Mercenaries and Mechwarrior 3. With tweaking and a couple hours sunk into combing the net for troubleshoots and patches I was able to get both to install and run, only to have later missions in the game become unbeatable due to crashes. I'm sick of it.

Well, that's a great answer and a great reason to dive into that.

Once you manage to get WinXP running I strongly recommend that you visit and follow this guide ( How To Configure Dos For Gaming, which you can find in our tutorial subforum in our Troubleshooting forum in case the link don't work) so you can set up your autoexec.bat and config.sys files so they work in DOS. You can also use Win98 DOS mode which is not really DOS but an extended version of it made specially for Win98. If you configure those aforementioned config files you will be able to play DOS games normally. If you don't you'll be likely to face the exact same problems you mentioned before.

WinXP does great with some games.

I have Magic The Gathering Shandalar running like a top on it. Diablo II is running like a top on it dunno if it was originally an XP release or what.

Yes, Disblo II is not that old and was released for Windows XP. Magic Shandalar was released for MS-DOS though.

Then you have a lot of no-music games. I believe Warhammer Shadow of the Horned Rat was one. Dungeons and Dragons Ravenloft Strahd's Possession was one. Dark Sun Shattered Lands was one also I believe. I find this unacceptable as the music often makes a game what it is. What would Mega Man, Ninja Gaiden or Final Fantasy have been without gaming music?

In Windows XP most of the time I simply use VDMSound and it work just as well.

Info available on our site About VDMSound AFAIK.

People try to band aid situations with Dosbox. Dosbox is a wonderful program. Its useability varies wildly. Some games its best to have a top of the line computer to bring the game up to normal speed. Some games music does not play. Lets be honest MS Dos was a B to play games in anyway with memory and other crashes the norm so I don't hate on DosBox but I want the real Operating Systems.

DOSBox pretty much simply emulate DOS. I've never had problems with it but I know there is some games which won't work in DOSBox.

However, if you think that playing with DOS is going to be that much easier to run DOS games... You obviously never played games in DOS back in the days. I did. I often spent almost as much time making games run than I did playing them. Prepare yourself for a steep learning curve...

I am doing research on Dual Boot. I would be open to whatever gets me multiple operating systems.

Sorry, can't help you with that. But I know it can be done.