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Is there DOS support?

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by digital-dj

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Vista had no support for DOS, Win7 has support, but you must pay for it (with something more powerful than the 'home version'. What is the support for DOS with this new version? Until I can find a newer version that supports DOS (remember when Gates et al said it would ALWAYS be backward compatible?) and without having to pay through the nose for it, I'll stick with XP.

11 replies

by robo_dev

In Vista you can run DOS programs, just typically not full-screen, unless you load the XP video driver or use a tool like DOS-box.

http://www dosbox com/wiki/Main_Page (put dots where spaces are)

I have a Win7 Starter system at home...will try running DOS apps on it....

by jpelectron

What a bunch of baloney, you can run DOS on any version of windows...

Start > Run > cmd

Bingo, now your in DOS!

by deadly ernest

since Win XP the amount of DOS it will accept and the ability to run program in DOS have been reducing.

by john hartshorn

Wrong! The DOS on Vista only runs in a tiny window and will not allow any extended/expanded memory, needed by legacy programs. I downgraded my otherwise really nice Toshiba Satellite to XP in order to get the robust DOS capability I require and I won't use any newer Microsoft OS unless they again allow full capacity DOS.

by seanferd

CLI != DOS. There is no DOS since Win 98/ME. It can be emulated to an extent on later systems. The command interpreters are quite different (command.com and cmd.exe).

DOS is the operating system. Versions of Win with DOS ran on top of DOS, a protected-mode GUI extension to the RTOS. NT systems have no DOS at all. But you can kind of fake it, if you are prepared for sudden failure at any time.

by deadly ernest

in a VM much like dosbox, not sure if it's something the church IT people loaded or if it came as part of Win 7 Enterprise, it also does a similar things with some XP aps too. I suspect the Win XP stuff is playing in the Win 7 Xp mode available on Premium and Enterprise and the DOS is running in a VM like Dosbox.

by john hartshorn

Dosbox will run for me on the Vista but it's incredibly slow. Like going back to a 1980s 8086 processor. I gave up and switched back to XP.

by who am i really

you need to use a third party DOS interpreter for that, or a 32 bit win version

also needed are the correct video drivers
the generic windows vga drivers don't always work for fullscreen

eg.
I'm poking around win 8 RP 32-bit and I can only open a windowed CMD window
I get a dialog stating: "System doesn't support full screen"
I also don't have the video drivers installed yet

by slayer_

If you using the 64bit version of Windows, they dropped support for 16 bit code. I don't know why.
If you really need to, change your windows 7 version to a 32bit version. Or use DOS emulation like DOSBOX.

by leonba

I'd be surprised if Windows 8 is friendlier to DOS than Win 7--but, there's always DOSBox. That's what I use when I want to run a DOS app.

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