[whateversky]

Hi all. ) Basically l just wanted to ask a question regarding old dos games and their relevance to windows 95 and 98? I want to play my old dos games again, namely the famous, leisure suit larry, police quest and lucasarts games... and more, but just out of curiosity are there any main differences with these old games and running them on windows 95 and 98. Actually l mean if you can run these games on windows 95 then you should be able to run them on windows 98 correct? If someone could tell me this l'd like that.
And secondly is the ms-dos system in windows 95 and 98 basically the same thing? Because l do not have windows 95 but only 98, and i'm purely using windows 98 for old games and other programs. And the reason why i'm using windows 98 is purely to see how leisure suit larry 6 runs with it, (aswell as other games of course) l had some trouble with dosbox, for 'that' particular game, but if anyone has had larry 6 up and running via something else please tell me.
Also l am aware of dosbox and l think its absolutely great! )) but l really just (for now) want to try using the ms dos with win 98, for the games just to check it out. l actually have vista at the moment as my main operating system.
Thank you again and stay well. )

Aaron

[leroys1000]

I think both 95 and 98 are based on versions of DOS 6.
Yes,dos based games should run equally well on either.

[Ed999]

If you have a real computer, running a real version of Windows 95, it may be using either FAT16 or FAT32. Whereas Windows 98 always uses FAT32. But MS-DOS 6, the version of DOS supplied with both Win95 and Win98, being 16-bit, will not notice any difference between them.

(Disclaimer: I don't know anything about running DOS or Win95/98 in a Vista virtual machine. I only know about *real* Win95/98 computers.)


You have two options in a real Windows 98 computer. You can boot to DOS or to Windows. With older DOS software you are better off booting to DOS (the Windows shutdown routine includes an option to "Restart in DOS mode", or boot from a Windows 98 bootdisk of the correct type: you'll know that there were two different versions of Windows 98).

Alternatively, if you boot to Windows you can run a DOS program in a DOS "box" from within Windows (which is NOT the same as the useful 3rd party DOSbox program!), but if you do this you always risk crashing Windows. Older DOS programs grab the system interrupts that Windows needs, and crash it.

Probably no DOS program released after Windows 3.1 came out will do that. But any 1980s DOS software might. It'll only happen once, right? Then you'll know not to run that program under Windows in future!

Boot to real DOS (a.k.a. pure DOS) and there'll be no chance of an incompatibility with Windows that might cause a crash, because Windows won't get loaded. Do it the easy way: put the proper driver file entries in CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT on the floppy, and boot from the bootable floppy. Don't mess with your vital CONFIG or AUTOEXEC files in the directory C:\ root.