Are you running Glidos on Vista?

I guess not :)

Art Raider wrote:

I am curious as to why VDos32 was developed.

From my perspective, VDos32 is a kind of NTVDM replacement for Vista ("replacement" being an incorrect word since there is no Virtual DOS Machine anymore in Vista). It should also work under XP, although my few attempts at making it work have been unsucessful so far. But I'll try harder when time permits.

Hi Kaminari, what problems did you run into with it?

Vista has an NTVDM just fine. It's just that the 64bit versions do not support 16bit programs.

Now I cannot tell you how compatibile the NTVDM in Vista is as compared to the NTVDM in XP and I probably never will be able to tell ya since I long ago stopped testing NTVDM but I have heard of people having problems with full screen programs in NTVDM bsoding their computers in RC's of Vista. IIRC, they got around this by using XP drivers or booting into VGA mode. Mabye if I get bored enough I'll test out the NTVDM in vista a little.....hopefully I won't get that bored since I've got tons of more important game testing to do instead of wasting it on throwaway DOS support by Microsoft in NTVDM.

Really?! I may be wasting my time then. You sure about all that?

The 64bit ntvdm would have to be a very different beast to the XP one. As I understand it, ntvdm supports 32bit DOS programs by running the extender (e.g., DOS/4GW) and the extender isn't going to work without 16bit support. Also the interface to mess with the LDT (needed for both the DOS and OS/2 subsystems) is missing from ntdll.dll

Admittedly, I can't see why 32bit Vista wouldn't included ntvdm, but then I'd have thought the people here running it might have mentioned this.

This is something that's niggled at the back of my mind. I don't have Vista myself, so I have no first hand knowledge.

Just tell me what you want me to test and I'll do it.....but only for you. 😉 I have no interest in going through comprehensive DOS testing with Vista NTVDM.

Unfortunately I do not have TR anymore but I do have Descent 2 and the Redguard demo. I'll have to see what other games I have that GliDOS supports....although anything else I probably only have the demos for.

Hey great, thanks.

I hadn't realised the problem was poor support. I'd read somewhere there was no DOS support. Should have known: read the same about XP before it came out. If the problem is just down to drivers, then that's likely to get sorted out after Vista is released.

The interesting thing then is 64bit Vista. It would be good to know if 64bit Vista can run any DOS/4GW based program. I'd have thought not.

Just out of curiosity, I did a search of my (64 bit) Vista directory for NTVDM and found a few files, but no EXE. In the SysWOW64 directory there is an ntvdm64.dll, which the properties says "16-bit Emulation on NT64"

64bit Vista does support some 16bit Installshield installers but that's it IIRC.

Ah, yes, that would explain it.

That's interesting. So NTVDM still exists in both Vista builds, but the 16-bit support is next to non-existant. I've search around for compatibility issues between DOS apps and Vista, and in all cases I found, the games don't work at all (with or without VDMS). It might not be representative, but I haven't found any case where DOS games run on Vista.

Poking at the Tomb Raider Forums, it seems nobody has been able to run TR1 on any build of Vista whatsoever -- that is, without the help of VDos32. That doesn't come as a surprise with Vista 64, but what about Vista 32? Does it really support 16-bit extenders?

I can confirm that Duke Nukem 3D runs fine in Vista NTVDM (with sound). That's all I've tested so far.

That's the 32bit version of Vista, yeah?

Yup. 32bit Vista.

Is there a demo ver of TR1 I can download from somewhere?

DosFreak wrote:

Is there a demo ver of TR1 I can download from somewhere?

http://www.tombraiderchronicles.com/tr1/demo.html

I tried to run few DOS games ( TR, Doom II, Heretic) on Vista RC2 with VDMSound - with no success.
A window appears:

16 bit MS-DOS Subsystem
This system does not support fullscreen mode. Choose 'Close' to terminate the application.

When I click 'Ignore' button, the game is trying to launch but after a while the same window appears. Clicking 'Ignore' for a several times makes a message about crashed Ntvdm.exe appear. No way to play so far. 🙁

That could well be a video driver problem. As far as I know DOS fullscreen support is partly the responsibility of the video drivers, not just that of the core of Windows.

One of the advantages that DosBox (and VDos32) has is that it drives the screen using the Windows API and hence doesn't rely on the DOS support.

Hey Zebius, Try running Vista with XP video drivers for your card.

I had to do this with my X800 video card since the Vista drivers were so bad. (Slow Aero desktop, graphical artifacts, no OpenGL, crashing games).

I didn't test any DOS games when I had the Vista video drivers loaded but I've heard that using the Vista drivers makes DOS games incompatible. There's a Powerpoint slide by MS describing this behavior if I could find the link to it again. (I also saved the presentation so hopefully I can find it there too).

So, I tried XP drivers on Vista (both graphic and sound) and Tomb Raider works in software mode with VDMSound, but FMVs do not play (black screen). In-game sound is awful - lots of cracklings. I tried many VDMSound settings, but it didn't improve anything. Combination: XP graphics drivers and Vista sound drivers gives instant crash.

Unfortunately Glidos doesn't want to start the game - I get a message about missing vddloader file, though VDMSound is installed.

I got a feeling that drivers designed for Vista will never support DOS games, so we will probably need emulators and VDos32.
XP drivers on Vista don't support Aero Glass interface, so I think nobody would use them just to play the old games.

Zebius wrote:

DosFreak wrote:

Is there a demo ver of TR1 I can download from somewhere?

http://www.tombraiderchronicles.com/tr1/demo.html

Well that was confusing. The download doesn't mention anything about DOS so I thought I was downloading some Windows port of TR1 (yeah right). Anyways got it downloaded.

Here it is. http://www.aeroxp.org/board/lofiversion/index.php?t6333.html

Powerpoint:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/b/9/ … CPA051_WH06.ppt