So, attempting to run a 16 bit Windows video game in 64 bit Windows 7 Home Premium is perhaps the most difficult environment to work with.
Is it impossible? Our guide on using DOSBox to run these 16 bit programs are typically sufficient for a number of these games. However, if this is a Windows Bit program, you may find yourself with the following error message when trying to boot the program with DOSBox:. For some people, this may be a message that tells them that they have reached the end of the road in terms of compatibility.
For quite some time, I was one of those people. However, after years of infrequent digging around, I was able to find a solution to this problem. There are versions of Windows — namely Windows 3. Frontends are simply visualizations of what we are attempting to do. There are numerous ways of getting Windows 3. You could buy a copy or find some mysterious download version off of some torrent site that rhymes with the pilot day.
The choice is yours. I prefer to work out of a folder directly on the main hard drive to simplify matters. Name that folder anything — preferably something that will allow you to remember later what that folder is for. Yes, we are heading straight into the oldschool DOS prompt. Remember, we are using the name of the first folder we created earlier here.
Dosbox is telling me that the drive was successfully mounted here. We successfully mounted the hard drive! The old version operates thinking we have a floppy drive. Way back then, everything came in thick square disks instead of larger fancier shiny round disks. Windows 3. So, we need to have a way to install Windows 3. So naturally, we want to mount the floppy drive.
It should look like this if we are successful:. We now have a floppy drive on a Windows 7 computer that physically has no floppy drive! At this point, I am assuming you have the contents of all seven diskettes nicely arranged in a folder somewhere on your actual hard drive. If not, you can do so now no harm in going back and doing this. What is ideal is to have the contents of the seven diskettes laid out nicely like this:. When it has finished installing the contents of the first diskette, the setup will ask for the removal of the first diskette and inserting the next diskette.
This will reset what Dosbox thinks is in all the directories. After that, hit Enter to continue the installation process. Shortly after this, it will prompt you for the third diskette. Again, simply remove the contents of the Floppy diskette folder and copy over the contents of the third diskette. To switch between the Windows 3.
The process at this stage is exactly the same. Remove the contents of your floppy diskette drive and copy over Diskette 4. It will, at this point, ask you if you would like to install a printer. I also skipped the tutorial as well. At this point, Windows 3.
I chose to reboot. Dosbox will then close down. Now that we have installed Windows 3. For that, we need to open Dosbox back up. At this point, we want to see if any old game would work. I exited out of Windows 3. Booted up Windows, went into File Manager, found the directory for my game, ran the. Yes, this is a 16 bit Windows video game running in Dosbox running in a Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit operating system.
While the game actually runs, there are no MIDI sounds old sound files used to play in the background of some games because of lack of sound drivers. This has to be manually installed. So, we go to the Control Panel. If nothing happens, at this point, exit Windows and mount drive A and direct it towards your floppy folder and go back into Windows and try again. Swap out contents of the floppy directory for diskette 5 and continue.
This part is truly trial and error, but the following settings worked for me the window in the top left corner means you were able to get the settings correct :. My advice in determining the correct setting quickly is to pay close attention to the error messages. Since restarting Windows 3. If you hear the old Windows chime, then that probably means you successfully installed the sound driver.
If all went well, you should hear the sound effect you selected:. MIDI seems to be a little buggy, but I can show you what worked for me. There may be better settings to use in the mean time, but for now, these settings worked:. This should allow the game to at least open up properly. This could add some stability. This step was a bit of a pain to figure out, but thankfully, there is a solution that is easy to follow.
If you ran any game in Windows 3. There is a way to fix this and even adjust the resolution of Windows to something that is more suited for your current display. The problem here is that what is running is VGA.
Create a new folder. This will be the name of your drivers you are using. If you feel the need to use different drivers in the future, you can simply create another directory in this directory for easy file management:. Now to get the drivers. Thankfully, the folks over on a forum with lots of Dosbox fans have posted the needed drivers as well as their own tutorial about these and other kinds of drivers. What we are after is the file located in the link I circled below:.
Once you have finished downloading the file, open it up and extract all the contents to the s3 folder:. Now, go back to Dosbox. We are going to install these drivers.
A familiar blue screen should appear. Currently, it is set to the default VGA:. Now, hit enter to go into the video settings. Use the down arrow key and go all the way down to the bottom holding it down takes you there the fastest. Now, remember where we put our drivers? Yes, we are working from the mounted folder. Since we are talking about 16 bit games, chances are quite good that all we are after is anything in colours since that is what many are designed to run in.
I personally chose anything with a small font myself. Simply press enter at this point. Simply re-type in the same driver location as before and hit enter. This is only for people who do this the first time. If there are any additional screens beyond this, just hit enter until you finally find yourself back at the dos prompt.
You can now freely play many classic 16 bit Windows video games like Mordor smoothly on Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit! Q: What kind of memory footprint are we looking at for something like this? A: For me, at the resolution the second highest at colours SF , my memory footprint while running one game looked like this:. In short, big name browsers with a handful of tabs can take up way more than what you see in Dosbox.
Q: Can something like Windows 95 work on Dosbox? One thing to remember is that the newer the operating system, the more memory it will take up to emulate the same game.
Emulating it via Dosbox would be redundant. In any event, Windows 3. A: This is an idea I have toyed with. Unfortunately, the experience of other people seems to suggest that WINE can be buggy. This way, the game is operating in a native Windows environment — an operating system that the games were designed for in the first place. A: That is definitely a possibility. However, I prefer something like this because, this way, no hard drive partitioning would be necessary.
You can also run a virtual machine as well. I have no idea what kind of memory footprint is required there, but the process also requires a certain amount of configuration just to get the emulated operating system to run.
A: The short answer is that it has to do with coding. There is currently no real way to run a 16 bit video game in a 64 bit environment as the two are incompatible with each other. This emulator theory is about one of the best ways to accomplish playing a 16 bit video game in a 64 bit environment. This app can Access all your files, peripheral devices, apps, programs and registry Use your microphone Access your Internet connection Microsoft.
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EXE command from anywhere. Click on Package files and check if all the files and directories listed are used by the application.
It is at this step that we need to add the Package Support Framework files, to allow the PsfLauncher The id corresponds to the Application Id defined in the application manifest, the executable contains the emulator path inside the package and the arguments the VB3 path inside the package. In the Package file tab, right click on Package folder and click on. Click on the Create button to generate the package and inform where the file should be generated.
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