XP Home and DOS games advice (1 Viewer)

[Iain Lambert]

I've got this lovely copy of Syndicate Wars, but my machine now runs XP Home, which doesn't have much in the way of DOS support. Has anyone got a way to get this running, or do I have to do fancy things with VMWare or somesuch?

 

[Jeff Kleist]

make yourself a DOS bootdisk from the program, or download one from (I think) bootdisc.com

 

[Chris Bardon]

There's actually a problem with creating a botdisk, and that's if you're running on an NTFS partition you're out of luck for playing DOS stuff. Unless there's some way to get DOS to read NTFS partitions (which I don't think there is) your best bet might be a multi-OS loader.

 

[Bill Slack]

Well... Does it run at all in XP? I play plenty of old games and use SoundFX in order to get sound to work.

 

[Iain Lambert]

D'oh! Yes, last night I remembered that I formatted the drive for NTFS, so I won't be doing much with it. Oh well, I guess it will have to go on the pile of 'things to play when I get around to using VMWare'.

 

[John_Berger]

I posted this in another thread just yesterday, but since it's relevant, I'll repost it here.
Your safest and least infuriating option is to get a removable hard drive bracket and a small hard drive that you might have laying around. These brackets fit into a 5-1/4" bay, and each hard drive is in its own enclosure. When you need another O/S, shut down (which you'd need to do in a dual-boot setup anyway), remove the hard drive, insert the hard drive with the O/S that you want, and turn the computer on.
Two of my PCs have this functionality, and it's just so awesome to have that flexibility for several reasons:
(A) Each hard drive is on its own so the entire disk can be used for the O/S.
(B) You do not have to worry about partitioning.
(C) You do not have to worry about running out of space in any one partition.
(D) If a hard drive fails, you lose that O/S and **only** that O/S. Get another hard drive and reinstall.
(E) It adds maybe ten seconds to the restart procedure to unlock, remove, insert, and lock the hard drives.
(F) You want to play with another O/S? Buy another frame (anywhere from $12-30) and throw in an old hard drive that you have laying around.
Believe it or not, I have fun running PC DOS 7.0 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 on an old 1.6 GB drive. I even have the TCP/IP drivers for my network card to connect to the Internet through my home network. Laugh if you want, but it's freakin' fast on a P266 and it gives me the true DOS mode that I want for playing some great DOS games that still have not been matched by newer games. ("Magic Carpet" anyone?)