Dosbox 0.7

[Paul Breeze paul.breeze@xxxxxxxx]

I recently downloaded and played around with the open software DOS
emulation Dosbox version 0.7 for Windows. It appears to run XY3 and XY4
pretty well and although xy4 is a little slow in loading compared with
under W2k, once loaded it appears to run at a decent speed. The initial
window size is small but this can be scaled up. I used 1024x768 which
worked fine, filling the screen horizontally, though not vertically.
Full screen doesn't actually use full screen either. (I assume that
this is because the text screen used by XY is 640x400 and Dosbox cannot
expand this to 640x480 in order to fill the screen, but I'm guessing
here.) The most significant problems I have found are that you cannot
print -- though I believe there is a patch to achieve this -- and that
Dosbox does not recognise the presence of Windows so it is impossible to
run windows programs from Dosbox. This seems to mean that Robert's cut
and paste routine will not work. (I certainly cannot get it to work
anyway.) However the other U2 routines I tried worked fine. There is
no sign of cursor lag when running in a window, either.
This is still work in progress and its main aim is to run old DOS games
but even at its present level of development it appears to me that
Dosbox offers good DOS emulation for running XY under a range of
different operating systems. It is quite simple to set up too. I would
certainly recommend it to anybody needing to run XY but running into
difficulties with an operating system.

Paul Breeze