> On Wed, 01 Jul 2009 10:55:36 -0300, Mike Monett wrote: >> I'm hoping a lot of these problems will soon go away. I have >> WinXP SP3 running in VirtualBox 3.0 on Ubuntu 9.04, and it works >> great.
>> But it doesn't like running my old DOS programs. The screen >> update is so painfully slow it makes the program unusable. I >> tried VB 2.1, but it was only slightly faster. > Have you tried any of the Linux DOS emulators? I find DOSBox > particularly useful for the odd DOS programs I still use. > http://www.dosbox.com/ > John. Hi John, Thanks for the suggestion. I really need to get Win98 running, since I have about 3 decades of code written in Borland Pascal that works with Win98 to find and load programs. For example, one of the biggest problems with Windows and Linux is you have to load the desired program, then find the file you want to work with. The search function is extremely poor, especially if you have hundreds or thousands of files in a folder to look through. My software generates an index of every file on the hard disk, and assigns a comment field to each file. I put keywords in the comment field, such as "pll", "phase noise", "dmtd", "xtal", etc. Then I use a modified Boyer-Moore search in assembly code to find all files that contain the keywords. It is very fast. For example, searching my hard disk for "timenuts" give the following result (search result list omitted for clarity): Searched 202,362 files in 4,130 directories Found 7 hits in 67.331 ms When I find the file I am looking for, I press a single key and my program loads the appropriate program with the target file. I don't have to remeber all the strange incantations needed to make each program perform the desired task - these are all hard-wired into my code and so takes care of all the details. This program is indespensable. I just don't know how I would survive if I had to work the way everyone else does. I would never be able to find anything. Unfortunately, these programs will not run satisfactorily in WinXP. They are so slow they are unusable. And all the other alternatives so far have one or more huge show stopper problems. For example, I tried QEMU. I can partition the drive, but QEMU doesn't want to save the partition information and it disappears the next time I boot. I'm sure there must be something I'm doing wrong, but I can't find any solution. I tried running Win98 in VirtualBox. This was a waste of time. The VGA screen only gives 640x480 resolution, which is unusable. There are several ways to improve this with external video drivers, but the main problem is there are no Guest Additions for Win98. So there are no shared folders to transfer files. Copying to the clipboard doesn't work, you have to constantly capture and release the mouse to go back and forth to Ubuntu, etc. One solution may be to run Virtual PC 2007 in Win XP. I tried that last night before going to bed, but I suddenly realized I need a much larger partition than the 2GB I was using to make Win XP compatible with the 2GB limit in DOS. So the first thing to try is to install another version of Win XP but with a much larger partition. I understand FAT32 will take 127.5GB, but Win XP can't format anything over 32GB. So I have to try running FDISK from a Win98 boot disk and see if the latest version of Ubuntu will let me read the Win98 floppy in Virtual PC 2007 running under Win XP SP3 running in VirtualBox 3.0. Whew! Thanks, Mike _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
