On 28 May 2010 at 16:35, Noel Stoutenburg wrote: > David W. Fenton wrote: > > > I'm also stunned every time I find out how backwardly compatible > > Windows is, even with old, nonstandard software. I hesitate to cast > > MS in the role of "good guy" here, but I don't know of any software > > for DOS/Windows that postdates the introduction of the IBM PC that > > cannot be run on current versions of Windows (Win7, for instance), > > whether directly or in a VM. > > I know MS-DOS programs exist which will not run under Windows, because > I have a "Tetris" clone called "columns" which was written for MS-Dos > (don't recall which version of MS-DOS; it ran on some machines under > 6.22, but not others. I suspect there were unsupported direct hardware > calls, but I don't know enough to know for sure), which I know will > not run under Windows 98. But there have been a couple of others which > were written under MS-DOS which do, even some whose ability to run > under WIN surprised the authors.
Games are the most likely suspects for that kind of thing, especially DOS games, which used direct access to hardware. That still worked under Win9x, though that was where problems began, but once you got to NT-based Windows, you were out of luck. It's possible you could get something like that to run under a Windows compatibility mode, but not likely. In that case you'd probably have to use a non-Windows VM to get it to run. BTW, Microsoft still has Windows 3.x available for download on MSDN. Yet, none of the Win9x versions and no NT-based version before WinXP is available. I've read that the lawsuit that MS lost regarding embedding was the reason Windows 2000 is unavailable, but I don't know if that effects all the others or not. So, if you've got disks for those older versions of Windows, hang onto them. You may or may not be able to trick them into installing in a VM, but you likely won't be able to get the OS anywhere else. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
