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Spaceman
Alright, maybe that's a little too strongly stated.
What I'm writing about is that for the foreseeable future, we will be able to play Wing Commander.
As you know, WC games do not work on Win2000. But now in the latest build of WinXP (2494), All WC:KS games, WC4 and WC Prophecy do work.
I probably violate my NDA by telling you this, but I wanted to tell you anyway :)
 
That's not too suprising. Legacy support has been important because MS is hoping that XP will be used on the home desktop... If the DOS games magically worked, then I'd be amazed (they wouldn't work, however) :)

TC

[Edited by TC on 06-24-2001 at 18:17]
 
Hehehe, what's there to try? There is no full DOS mode in WinXP and you can only use a bootdisk to get a full DOS mode if your hard drives are formatted as FAT32. Having the DOS games working within WinXP would be pointless since there is no DOS sound support in NT. And that's all Win2k and WinXP are.. glorified NT.
 
No, the DOS games don't work. I'm talking about Beta 2 now, because that is public knowledge, so I don't violate the NDA (and because I haven't actually tested the DOS games in 2494 yet, but needless to say I'd be surprised if they'd work).
They can be run no problem. You can see them, play them, etc. Video is not a problem, because in full screen mode, the bios of your vidcard takes over. For VESA games, this means that you'd need to switch to full screen before starting them, and don't let WinXP do that automatically for you.
The real problem is sound. XP, like all NT flavours, doesn't allow direct hardware access. MS does include a 'Virtual SoundBlaster' in the NTVDM, but it doesn't work very well now. But for me, the DOS games don't work in DOS too, since my SBLive! is not compatible enough with the old SB's to actually produce any sound.
And with WC1 speed would probably also be a problem in the DOS version.
But we're getting there. Nearly all my important games (DOS games not included) that didn't work in Win2k work in XP. All my hardware is supported OOB in XP. On top of that, even for games, XP is actually faster than Win9x. And several games that I couldn't play under WinMe, because they constantly crash (Black & White, NFS Porsche Unleashed) work perfectly under XP.
So mister 'I hate NT', don't judge what you haven't seen.
 
Hmm... I bet the guys over in the tech support forum could help you make SB:Live work in DOS mode.

TC
 
I am not sure this is a good news for me...
I really like Win2K because it is very stable and I can open many "big" programs like 3DS Max, photoshop, premiere, and so on at once. I assumed that the price of this stability was the incompatibility with DOS and early win95 games such as KS and WCP.
I hope M$ won't sacrifice the stability of xp in order to make him to be more compatible. I do not mind to have a dual boot win98/winXP : one for playing and the other for "working".

But if the os is as good as win2k and support KS and WCP, then you are right : it will rock !!! :D
 
LiveWare3 lets you use your SB!Live in DOS, IIRC...

More importantly, though, will WinXP let us reboot to DOS and play the old games? That's all we really need...
 
Except bootdisks don't work if your hard drive is NTFS. If you leave it FAT, you lose a lot of the NTFS advantages. Granted most of those advantages are only useful in a network environment...
 
Keep an old drive FAT-32 then. Still, even a bootdisk isn't a long term solution. Eventually you're not going to be able to get that sound card to run in DOS, for instance. It's better to pick up a $25 486 or such.
 
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