Re: Better than DOSBox, etc.

["Kari Eveli" lexitec@xxxxxxxx]

>I must say it's baffling and disheartening that today's computers
should have any problems emulating DOS. Since we are all going to be
doing some form of emulation in the future, it doesn't look great.

There are major problems with Parallels, Oracle VirtualPC (free!), VMWare (which do a great job of
running Linux and other new operating systems, like 32-bit XP). There simply is not support for DOS.
Even in VirtualPC 2007 DOS support has been phased out. DOSBox is a different kind of beast, but not
easy to master, has serious limitations, and not a general-purpose virtualization tool. My
conclusion is that Virtual PC is the only general-purpose virtualization system with some kind of
DOS support, albeit not great, but still quite manageable.

Basically, there are two major options when moving Xy to the newest operating systems:

1) Virtual PC with DOS additions + DOS + optionally Win 3.1 on top of it for DOS task switching etc.
More about this at: http://www.lexitec.fi/xywrite/utility.html
Ready to run virtual machines availalable (with and without Win 3.1) at:
http://www.ohmancorp.com/RefWin-VirtualPC.asp (if you own the licenses!)

2) other virtualization platform with 32-bit XP for running Xy

Or moving to Win NB.

Jon wrote: I tried Virtual PC 2007 first, with both Win98 and DOS 6.22. If XY is on the virtual
drive, within the virtual machine, it runs smoothly, multiple windows and all. But try to run
Editor from the Shared Folder, and Virtual PC just sits there--thinking or crashing, I'm not sure.

The lesson, do not put Xy outside of the virtual machine, instead call your file from outside, e.g.
if X: is your shared folder, "call X:myfile.xy". That should work. Or you could put
"BX X:" in your startup.int and all work files appear in the shared folder, just issue a
"DIR" and "call myfile.xy".

As for clipboard, any Windows editor can open a shared folder file (EditPad lite even refreshes it automatically!) or you could place it in the clipboard by issuing "CLIP filename.txt" from a batch file (by using Clip.exe by David Navarro, look for clip.exe, clip.txt in: http://tachyon.zapto.org/binaries/).

Best regards,

Kari Eveli
LEXITEC Book Publishing (Finland)
lexitec@xxxxxxxx

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