How to get to dos

How do I get to DOS and not the DOS prompt shell in windows? back when we had win3.11 we hit the shift key before windows had loaded but with the newer Os I don't know how to do it.

Because of the way microsoft removed a good chunk of dos in NT based Windows versions (2000 and XP and whatever) you can't.

Removed? NT was built from the ground up not to rely on DOS being present in the background.

I think the last was with 95/98 to where they were upgrades upon each other (going back to 3.1 if thats where you started upgrading) you would have had dos 5.0 or higher installed as an os bed upon witch your windows were installed, letting you boot from your "previous version of ms-dos" upon exit or shut down. but with the advent of windows xp, dos has been lost for good since 7.0 and is not a bootable os. but if it was removed after an update/installation of 95/98 then you no longer can boot back into it upon exit in either case.. i think it was under add/remove programs: "delete your previous version of ms-dos" to free up disk space (in 95/98)

that's what I thought, well my version of rott says it can't run in a dos shell, wtf?

Bloodshedder said:

Removed? NT was built from the ground up not to rely on DOS being present in the background.

Orly? Heh, i thought it was built upon 3.1 or something. Learn something new every day :D

Well, you can always boot from a Win98 startup disk (bootdisk.com), but you may have some difficulties initializing sound hardware.

http://dosbox.sourceforge.net

just pointing in the right direction.

WinME can be hacked to have DOS booting ability btw.

I honestly don't know how you people get on not knowing how to make your DOS programs work in XP. Not only is it dead easy, but its a lot faster than dosbox.

So you can't boot to dos. Oh noes. Run it directly from windows. And if it doesn't like cmd.exe launching things run command.com and use that.

also mess with the "run in compatibility with" option

okay it seems to run okay now.

rott runs fine in xp. with no music.

HobbsTiger1 said:

I honestly don't know how you people get on not knowing how to make your DOS programs work in XP. Not only is it dead easy, but its a lot faster than dosbox.

turning sound off/running in VGA (where available) does not count, and what about win2k? They really can't run dos games at all as it'll freeze up.

Bleh. Even to me this is considered "Not just XP" because it isn't. But I use VDMSound and every one of my sound supporting DOS games has sound. I also run SVGA/VESA modes when they are available. Obviously things like my build engine games had to go through major tweaking, but they run. As for Windows 2000 users, well, they are out of luck for the most part I'm afraid, as DOS support is really terrible in that OS.

The only thing Windows 2000's DOS support is lacking compared to XP is XP's (crappy) built-in sound emulation. VDMSound works fine in Win2K.

With enough tweaking you can get almost anything to work in a DOS shell, except Sound Blaster emulation (which is why I still have my old Creative Labs AWE-64). The only thing I've got that doesn't work in a DOS shell is Jazz Jackrabbit, which is stuck in slow-motion mode.

Xanthier said:

okay it seems to run okay now.

If you want to run great, get WINROTT at http://home14.inet.tele.dk/Bna-Info/index.htm .