i was thinking about this lately: i heard windows 2000 was far more stable than any other windows and is based on the WinNT kernel. the next consumer version of ms windows, whistler, is gonna be based on the winnt kernel which means very poor if ANY dos support. anyway back to win2k, what i was thinking is that would it be possible to make a win95/98 boot disk (that will boot to a command prompt) and use it on a win2k system? this way if i want real dos mode i can put a disk in to boot win95/98 in command mode complete with an autoexec.bat and config.sys with dos mode drivers for a sound blaster pci 128 (if any exist - i plan to use that card in my new computer) is it possible?

BTW i intend to run more than just mame in dos mode - there is a kick ass freeware dos game called "chickens 2"... TIA

-- david oliver (davedude1414@yahoo.com), February 05, 2001

Answers

If you install Windows 2000 with 9x already installed, it should automatically set up a boot menu so you can choose between the two. How you go about setting up your Program Files and stuff is a different matter (I haven't bothered) :)

Making a bootdisk for command mode only would work too, as long as you don't use NTFS (which I wouldn't really recommend anyway, use FAT32). MAME32 is pretty good though.

-- seymour (seymour@iname.com), February 06, 2001.

Don't believe anything MS tells you!! They still continue to pump out a lot of crap products and can't write bug-free software to save their lives. What you say is possible, but to run MAME under pure DOS you will also need a memory manager called CSDPMI. You can have this loaded automatically at boot time. You'll get awesome performance!

-- Pat (laffaye@mail.com), February 06, 2001.

umm...pat...if you search my recordings you will find all of them are done with dos mame so i'm well aware of CWSDPMI. i tried mame32 once and i found it quite a bit slower than dos mame. for some reason it just doesn't have the same "feel" as if running in pure dos than mame32.

and as for what seymour said i thought about it - it will not work with a win95 bootdisk because it wont support hard drives >2gb. (as far as i know - does OSR2 fix this?)

-- david oliver (davedude1414@yahoo.com), February 06, 2001.

Just because you submit DOS INPs doesn't mean you used the memory manager!! A lot of players run DOS MAME from either a DOS Full Screen or Window which does not require CWSDPMI.

BTW, a Win98 boot disk will overcome the 2 GB limitation...

-- Pat (laffaye@mail.com), February 07, 2001.