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masterhassan

windows me BAD no dos support at all!

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my cousin got it adn it sucks yopu cant play anything that runs under dos appropriatly, no keys work. i tried playing doom2 and got really pissed off, dont get it if you play dos gaems, thats the botom line

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Guest ChriS

Make sure he HAS a Windows source port (PRBoom, Legacy, EDGE, Zdoom, etc) to play :P

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It's been a pretty obvious trend. When going from Win 3.11 to Win95, that was a major downgrade. Win95 to Win98 was even worse, and I expect that Millennium Edition will be the worst Windows edition ever. If it weren't for lazy companies not making software support for Win3.11/Dos 6.22 I'd be using those right now, and getting a hell of a lot more out of this machine.

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I wasn't aware of that... I guess I will be careful with upgrading. If you want old games to run, KEEP DOS ON! Then make a boot disk so you can load up either Dos OR Windows.

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A lot of times that won't work, Windows98 and Millennium Edition, and even the second release of Win95 use a FAT32 file system which is incompatable with FAT16 (that's like how files are written on the hard drives: FAT16 uses 16Kb clusters and FAT32 uses 4Kb clusters [If I remember correctly].) The very first Win95 Upgrade can be set to do a multiboot between old DOS, Windows 3.11 and Win95. I don't feel like explaining that now but if you have that Win 3.11 --> Win95 upgrade I can show you how. If you try with the full version of Win95 or Win98 to do the DOS multi-boot you end up freezing right after the computer boots and it's a real mess to fix, to say the least.

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Lüt said:

It's been a pretty obvious trend. When going from Win 3.11 to Win95, that was a major downgrade. Win95 to Win98 was even worse, and I expect that Millennium Edition will be the worst Windows edition ever. If it weren't for lazy companies not making software support for Win3.11/Dos 6.22 I'd be using those right now, and getting a hell of a lot more out of this machine.

Oh please. Who gives a shit about DOS? It's a mess, and I can't see why you'd want to run a DOS-era game on the kind of system you'd install WinME on anyway.

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A large number of people I know automatically switch to the next operating system microsoft release yet they always have horrendous problems learning their way around... for windows, I've always stuck with Windows 95 OSR 2 which is the least buggy version of win9x that you can find.

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The only DOS program I know doesn't work under Windows ME is DCK (that is irritating enough, though). I think that ME is Windows 98, with very few changes. One irritating bug (or perhaps incompability with my hardware) is that my computer can shut down and restart at any time. Today it shut down when I was watching a movie in Media Player, yesterday it shut down when I was playing Diablo II. I have no idea why.

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Lüt said:

A lot of times that won't work, Windows98 and Millennium Edition, and even the second release of Win95 use a FAT32 file system which is incompatable with FAT16 (that's like how files are written on the hard drives: FAT16 uses 16Kb clusters and FAT32 uses 4Kb clusters [If I remember correctly].) The very first Win95 Upgrade can be set to do a multiboot between old DOS, Windows 3.11 and Win95. I don't feel like explaining that now but if you have that Win 3.11 --> Win95 upgrade I can show you how. If you try with the full version of Win95 or Win98 to do the DOS multi-boot you end up freezing right after the computer boots and it's a real mess to fix, to say the least.

Some facts about the FAT system:

In FAT16 the cluster size depends on the complete disk space. Since there can be only 65536 clusters, one cluster must be at least diskSize / 65536 bytes. On a 2GB disk this means a cluster size of 32768 bytes (32 KB), higher disk sizes are not supported.

Using FAT32 you can have up to 2^32 = 4,294,967,296 clusters, the cluster size is always 4 kb (I think), so a partition can be up to 4 kb * 2^32 = 2^2 * 2^10 * 2^32 = 2^44 bytes = 17,592,186,044,416 bytes = 16 tb

All these values are theory. Due to limitations in the definition of the FAT, maximum partition sizes are lower.

BTW: The first FAT system was FAT12 which was written for 16kb disks. Since then the general FAT structure hasn't changed.

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Guest fraggle`

WinME doesnt allow direct hardware access for dos applications apparently. However, when you consider the added stability of ME this is more than worth it. Running doom isnt a problem, there are plenty of functional win32 doom ports.

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Guest doomgod12345

doom was tested on windows me and it runs in it dos mode many games will, well it is not really dos but it can run the games. i read about that in pcworld

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