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[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.

[Japo]

It's possible that your Windows installation CD is not bootable. To make sure you could remove your hard disk from the boot sequence altogether (not just move it down), and if none of your other drives in the list are bootable, you'll know because your computer will fail to boot with a clear error message ("no boot disk/media" or something like that). You can always get back to the BIOS to restore the defaults.

If your CD isn't bootable you can certainly boot from a USB drive. It must be specially formatted or prepared. It's not just copying some files; and I don't think Windows does it. On this website you can download a program to make a USB bootable and add some diagnostic utilities in it:

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/customize.html#usb

I've never set up Windows in multi-boot, but I think it doesn't provide a generic solution. If I'm not wrong, when you proceed to install a newer version of Windows and you already have an older one, you may get the option to set up a dual boot, instead of erasing the older one. In other cases Windows doesn't provide multi-boot, as far as I know.

I think there are Unix-like boot loaders that give you greater flexibility, specially if you want to dual boot between 'nix and Windows, but I don't know if they help you with installing two different Windows versions. One of these might be what you found.

Virtual PC is far easier than any of this. Your BSOD is a symptom of a problem not particular to VPC, that you should try to solve anyway.

Please note that if you install Windows 98 in your real machine to play DOS games, you may find that they don't work properly because your CPU is too fast or any other hardware issue.

The "DOS mode" in Windows 9x (when you re-boot into the command line) is indeed completely real DOS. Only it's DOS version 7.x.

[Smiling Spectre]

Originally Posted by stinkywizzleteats

Ok I have tried for a couple hours now to get this thing to boot off of CD. I can't figure out whats wrong. The best I could get it to do was act like it was going to do something then spit out a long string of numbers in the black screen and something about IDE and Intel.

As Japo says, most probably it means that your CD is not bootable. I seen it several times, with self-written CDs, that must be bootable, and even is bootable in some systems - but not another. Had no luck in deciphering what is the reason of it, so usually I am taking another CD in such cases.

Would it be Windows98 in .iso format?

Basically, you can put content of Win98 CD on USB. As far as you can boot into command prompt, you can start setup.exe manually. But I have no idea how to make it bootable. Hope, Japo's links will be good for you.

Originally Posted by Eagle of Fire

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

Error. Twice.

Both games are from Win98 era, and made for that. Also, MtG have some problems on XP - two can be fixed with proper setting and ACT, third is too elusive, happens on rare systems and have something with low-level drivers conflict.

Originally Posted by Japo

I've never set up Windows in multi-boot, but I think it doesn't provide a generic solution. If I'm not wrong, when you proceed to install a newer version of Windows and you already have an older one, you may get the option to set up a dual boot, instead of erasing the older one. In other cases Windows doesn't provide multi-boot, as far as I know.

Well, actually, WinXP is unaware about Vista/Win7 (obviously), so installing XP surely mess with Win7 anyway.

But usual fix with windowses is re-install 7 over win98 on the same place where it was. If dual boot is supported on Win7 (I have no idea, honestly), you will get working dual boot system.

Virtual PC is far easier than any of this. Your BSOD is a symptom of a problem not particular to VPC, that you should try to solve anyway.

Please note that if you install Windows 98 in your real machine to play DOS games, you may find that they don't work properly because your CPU is too fast or any other hardware issue.

Second here. I abandoned my 98 after that it become incompatible with my motherboard. Having generic video and lot of non-recognized peripheral is not very fun, actually. Also, it behave... fuzzy with RAM over 2GB. And you need partition your disk in FAT32, as NTFS supported only from XP and up.