Re: DOS nostalgia

["Patricia M. Godfrey" priscamg@xxxxxxxx]

Caesarwien@xxxxxxxx wrote:
> How do I get DOS + XYWRITEf onto VISTA?  kurt/Je-06-10
DOS is there already (Microsludge doesn't think you need to know
it, but it's there). Open your C:\ drive in Explorer, navigate to
\Windows\System32, and look for cmd.exe. Make 2 shortcuts to it
on your desktop. Leave one as it is; you can click on it anytime
you want to run some old DOS command like DIR, XCOPY, MEM, and
the like.
Don't try to ïnstall Xy; find a machine where it's running (I can
mail you a CD or send you a ZIP of the whole megillah). Edit all
the config files (startup.int, settings.dfl, xywwweb.reg,
xy4.kbd, and any others you've made) to reflect the drive
structure of your new setup; that is, if you were running xy off
drive D:, in a directory called XY4, and in the new system that
DIR is going to be on c:\DOSapps (as I had to do on my Netbook
when I discovered that XP Home gets terminally confused if you
have 2 SD cards in the system)). Save those files to the new
directory, copy everything else there.
If you want to be a diehard, you can just create your shortcut to
editor.exe. But on Carl's advice, I've been doing the following
on XP and Vista since I got them. Right click on that 2d CMD.exe
shortcut you created.
Choose Properties. In the box labeled Target, type
C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /c d:\Xy4\Editor.exe
(note that there is a space before and after "\c"),
substituting the fully qualified path name of editor.exe's directory.
In the box for Start in, enter editor.exe's directory.
In the font tab choose whatever you like (I use Lucida Console 16
point, being highly myopic).
In the layout tab, set Window size to width 80, length 25; you
can experiment with changing them later if you like; to what
degree you can will depend somewhat on your screen and video bios.
Lastly, on the Shortcut tab, choose Change Icon; I believe Bry
Henderson posted a collection of Xy icons on his site a few years
ago, if you don't have one.
And that's it. I run Xy thus on the XP Home netbook and two Vista
machines, with no problems--unless I do something stupid, which I
do sometimes.
As for XyWin, I think the problem may be not (as I had been
thinking) BIOS but memory. On the Netbook (running XP Home) I had
copied the whole thing over from the live hard drive of an
otherwise dead system. I could click on XyWin's executable, and
it would start, but because I had not edited the configuration
files, it kept complaining "Cannot find file..." So I finally sat
down and edited all the config files. And then it started to load
and hung with "There is not enough memory to perform the
operation." I had to go to the 3-fingered salute to unfreeze the
machine. That box is now in the shop (battery died, fortunately
still under warranty, and the manufacturer wanted the whole thing
back to make sure it wasn't the charging mechanism or the power
pack). But when I get it back I'm going to run MEM /C under
varied circumstances and see what I get. Except, of course, that
MEM is a shell game under everything from XP up: you can have two
DOS apps open (Xy4 and dBase5 in my case), and be told that there
is so much lower DOS memory. They CANNOT both be sitting in the
lower 640.
And yes, you can use a USB thumb drive to copy the files. Or even
run them off it, using either Robert's or Carl's Portable
configuration. Because I print from Xy, and therefore want access
to Ghostscript and gsview, I tend to prefer an installed set up;
but portable has lots of advantages.
--
Patricia M. Godfrey
priscamg@xxxxxxxx