Hi all,
I run DP on Win7Pro 64bit, using VMWare Player. It easy to do, and you get great performance if you use say Windows 98SE as the Guest operating system. You can of course use Win 7 32Bit as the Guest operating system but that's a lot of overhead to run a DOS app that itself can easily fit a floppy diskette if anyone could ever find one of those relics from the past. I have also had reasonable success with running FreeDOS/PCDOS and MSDOS as the guest operating system, but there a few hurdles to overcome. Firstly you need to create a VM Machine and hard drive and leave it empty. Then you have to create a DOS bootable virtual floppy boot disk, (I am trying to think what software I used for that), but you can tell VMWare to use this "floppy diskette image", and its bidirectional, you can read and write to the virtual image from within VMWare. You need to configure the VM to use this image as its floppy diskette (You can do the same thing with CD-ROM or ISO images, but since you need to install drivers into DOS to read the CD-ROM it is something of a Catch-22, you can add CD-ROM support later in the configuration) I should add that the Virtual Floppy Diskette image must contain not just the boot files, but also you will probably need utilities like Format.com, MSCDEX.EXE, XCOPY, etc etc, whatever you can fit into 1.44Mb (I have never gotten the 2.88Mb Floppy image VMWare supports to work) The next hurdle is to get VMWare to boot this floppy, normally it will want to boot from the virtual hard drive you originally create, and the damn things runs so fast that you can't press the F2 or F12 key to configure create a boot sequence so that it tries to boot from the floppy first. If you insert "bios.bootDelay = "5000"" as a line in the VM's VMX file then you will get a 5 second (5000 milliseconds) window of opportunity to get to the F12 key to choose to boot from floppy. Ok, so here you are. Probably looking at a very familiar screen (for older members) where you are asked to enter today's time and date, followed by another familiar C:\> It all becomes very nostalgic. So then you have to do some work. The next thing to test your memory and internet researching abilities is to set up the autoexec.bat and config.sys so that you can configure the DOS memory, HIMEM UMB, Files and Buffers (you need these to get DP to work, a minimum of 40 files). (DO NOT be tempted to load SHARE, it was never much use anyway). You also need to add the Driver for the CDROM and parameters into the config.sys, and MSCDEX and its parameters into the autoexec.bat. But once you have that you have a virtual machine that boots up (and very quickly if you remove or change the bios.bootDelay parameter, and get to a comfortable C:\> in no time flat, unless you left the boot sequence to Floppy diskette and still have the image in. Ok now to whet your appetite you will need to get DP and say a DP application on there. You can access shares, USB sticks. Floppies are just a little slow, because you cannot change the virtual floppy, so you could repetitively reboot the VM incrementally and copy fragments from incrementally created floppy images. I chose to put a large app and the DP files onto an CD ISO image, using WinImage (I think) as the creator. Then XCOPY'd (if you remembered to install it and set the PATH so your dos utilities), into a new folder. You can use the internal COPY command, but my app had folders to contend with so XCOPY is far less of a headache. Fire up DP and watch it fly. But, now the really difficult part starts. Its one things to have DP working on a Virtual Machine island but to interact with the real world is more difficult. First you need to install a network device driver then TCP/IP stack, and then an MS NET Client or similar on top. There are many of these. Then you have to tweak it to access shares (remember that DOS will not connect to a share not in 8.3 name format. Also the Host needs some registry changes to allow the type of authentication that the early DOS network clients used, and then you need to set us shares for the printers, and redirect LPT1, to use one of these shares. I got it working some time ago, and I was pleased with how it worked, but it was way too much work. The Win98SE alternatively works wonderfully, and you do not have to worry about Windows activation like with later versions, so you can keep multiple versions of your appliance (remembering of course Microsoft's licencing arrangements J) printing works fine, I imagine things like DPSpool etc will also work. Antiviruses are a problem since there are not too many now for Win 98, but if you only ever use it for DP then its probably not much of a worry. By using a more lightweight Guest OS, there are few demands on late model hardware so you will probably see Win98 work at speeds you never thought possible. Sharing files either direction etc is also so much easier. If I ever have time, and that's rare with two kids around the house, and if I can make a pre-made appliance which does not breach Microsoft licencing I will upload one so anyone can use it. Bye Brian From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Gerard van Loenhout Sent: Saturday, 16 February 2013 7:31 AM To: Jon Ong Cc: Dataperfect Users Discussion Group Subject: Re: [Dataperf] Screen size win7/32 Jon, I find dosbox a bit too slow building up, especially with data from links. And we are 5 people using it on a network, that's why I chose not to use dosbox. But I guess a relaxed person like you ;-) would probably be okay with dosbox. You can always try it. It's free. I know other people that are happy with dosbox on Win7/64. Gerard 2013/2/15 Jong <[email protected]> Gerard, Geert & Tim: Really nice to get continued support for our DP dinosaur from the gang. I've considered switching to Access or other databases but I still believe simple is better, especially with complex data sets that I deal with in a medical practice. Full screen really only a concern for the portable netbooks I have to carry around at work, I realize that's not too much of an issue on the big screen. >From what I've seen so far, someone (excuse me for forgetting who it was) said win7/32 pro allowed XP emulation with full screen so it looks like that's the easiest way to go for me. As for win7/64, (which unfortunatley I have on one of my laptops), it looks like best solution is creating a virtual PC using VMware and then WinXP -- lots of work there. Jon -----Original Message----- From: Gerard van Loenhout [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, February 15, 2013 12:26 AM To: [email protected] Cc: [email protected]; Dataperfect Users Discussion Group Subject: Re: [Dataperf] DOS in Win 7/64 questions Hi Jong! I use DP Win7 / 32 Home. The window is not bigger than the dosbox in XP. I find it quite comfortable to work with. With these big screens nowadays I haven't actually tried fullscreen. Geert probably knows more. Gerard 2013/2/14 Jong <[email protected]> Geert & everyone: Thanks for the latest info on Dp in Win7/32, just a few clarifiers: 1. Do you have pro or home version Win7/32? 2. Does DP run in full screen mode? 3. How do you print up your HTML output from DP? 4. Is there a print spooler we can use similar to DP Spool to make printing seamless? Jon -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of [email protected] Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2013 6:49 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Dataperf] DOS in Win 7/64 questions Hi all, I can only agree with Gerard : I am running DP 'straight out of the box' without any problem on a Win7/32 system. NB: I don't even use Tame ! All my reports are saved into html-files, which solves all possible printing problems... Regards, Geert. On Wed, 13 Feb 2013 09:03:25 +0100, Gerard van Loenhout <[email protected]> wrote: > Don, I was the one who started the most recent discussion about Win7. > DosBox is too slow. I bought a couple of Win7/64 PCs at Dell. I bought > a CD from them with Win7/32 for the same PCs so I had the right > drivers. Now DP works fine. > 2013/2/12 Don Friedman <[email protected]> >> I know that there has been discussion about this but I can't seem to >> find >> a way to search it out on the main site. Is their a trick to that? >> I've finally "grown up" and put a couple of Win7/64 boxes in the office. >> I'm assuming that I can run dosbox to run DP without much trouble - I >> never >> have a need to print from DP and if I remember right that was part of >> the >> problem. Am I on the right track here? I'm assuming that it will still >> be >> faster to run DP via dosbox on my newer machines than to run them on my >> older XP machine. >> Don >> -- >> *Don Friedman >> ProfessionalRecords.Com LLC >> PRS Data Systems >> Liveport WiFi* _______________________________________________ Dataperf mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dataperfect.nl/mailman/listinfo/dataperf _______________________________________________ Dataperf mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dataperfect.nl/mailman/listinfo/dataperf
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