Msg: Re: DOS nostalgia

On Sun, Jun 6, 2010 at 5:18 PM, Patricia M. Godfrey mailto:priscamg@xxxxxxxx wrote:

mailto: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 (http://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
mailto:priscamg@xxxxxxxx