Are you trying to run these games with VDMSound?

For the freezing problem:

Search in the c:\Windows or C:\winnt folder, within the files themselves for the text "ke386".

As for the fullscreen, black screen problem. What video modes do these programs use?

No, no VDMSound (they don't need sound anyway in a classroom) just plain ol' xp cmd shell.

Dosfreak: what would these files be? Since I'm not there at the moment I searched on my machine and there are several files with 'ke386'...I'll try to get one on the apps Monday and see how it works on my machine and which video mode it uses...

The files with ke386 in them in System32 or system32\drivers may freeze your DOS programs. If you have multiple ones just rename their extension and then reboot untiil you find which ones freeze your DOS programs.

As for the video issues read this thread, patch for WinXP/2000 monitor issues

The latest version with XP SP2 support is on the webpage on the last post in the thread.

Thanks for the link. vga.sys fix looks promising. I'll try it and report back 😁

I finally found the time to check the fix 🤣

Unfortunately vga.sys did not work 🙁. It was the same as before, black screen with cursor blinking in the top left corner. I'll attach one of the games here, I asked and they told me it was freeware. I think it uses 640x480 and it works quite slowly in dosbox. It also works fine on my computer nativly in XP so I really don't understand what could be the problem...

Hmmm. Borland's BGI. Very old. I get the following error message both under native XP NTVDM and DOSBox.

Napaka v grafiki: Invalid device driver file (EGAVGA.BGI)
Izvajanje programa ustavljeno

hmm...interesting.

Rough transtlation to english would be:

Graphics error. Invalid device driver file (EGAVGA.BGI)
Program terminated.

Replaced EGAVGA.BGI with a different one (from a game) and I am still getting the same error message. 😕

Found out what the problem was and made a fix for the executable. BGI searching was set for C:\TP\BGI - Now it searches in the current directory. 😁

That's even more strange...since I don't have C:\TP directory anywhere and the game is working fine on my system 🤣

I just checked the other non-working app (which is not free so I cannot post it here). Checking the executable it seems to be borland as well. But there are no *.bgi files in the directory, might be compiled in. Is there maybe newer version of Egavga.bgi available which might fix the problem??

Try creating a bogus C:\TP\BGI folder and copy all .bgi file there. Check to see if the game runs properly that way.