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First post, by donbueno

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My dad has been running his 500K plus a year business on a couple of old laptops running dos 6.2 and word perfect 6.0. I am trying to create or "emulate" his older comps using dosbox. I come to a problem while installing word perfect when it asks to change disks. I opened another instance of dosbox and mounted the second disk but that did nothing. Any help would be appreciated. Also the main reason I was doing this was to make sure he could print out his reports, would dosbox allow me to print from word perfect to a newer laser printer? (and trust me I know the insanity of this situation he is self employed investor and, for his backups he has three laptops and printers in different geographical locations...) And yes this is a serious post. How do i install word perfect in dosbox and once done will it print through windows for me? thanks again

Reply 1 of 9, by HunterZ

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Are you using disk images or physical disks?

For the image case you can specify a series of images to be mounted in a rotating fashion (rotation being accomplished via a hotkey).

For the physical disk case, you can use a hotkey to flush the disk cache so that the new disk is recognized/scanned by DOSBox.

Consult the readme.txt included with DOSBox for details.

Reply 6 of 9, by donbueno

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I wish that would work it seems so much simpler, the computer this is all coming from does not have windows and the wp60 dir is bout 8 megs so I dont know how I will get it over to mine (wish i could just plug in my usb key) I will give the hotkey suggestion

Reply 7 of 9, by Jorpho

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HunterZ wrote:

For the image case you can specify a series of images to be mounted in a rotating fashion (rotation being accomplished via a hotkey).

For the physical disk case, you can use a hotkey to flush the disk cache so that the new disk is recognized/scanned by DOSBox.

Consult the readme.txt included with DOSBox for details.

This only works with CD ISO images. As of 0.73 it does not work with floppy images. The better option is Virtual Floppy Drive.

Every question you might have about running old versions of WordPerfect on newer computers - including matters related to printing - can be found on the most excellent website that is http://www.wpdos.org .

Reply 8 of 9, by HunterZ

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Jorpho wrote:

This only works with CD ISO images. As of 0.73 it does not work with floppy images.

Hmm, could have sworn I've done it with floppies but I guess my memory is faulty.

Every question you might have about running old versions of WordPerfect on newer computers - including matters related to printing - can be found on the most excellent website that is http://www.wpdos.org .

Looks like that site waves people away from using DOSBox and talks about running under the NTVDM instead. This won't work for people on 64-bit OSes, which will be everyone eventually.

Reply 9 of 9, by Jorpho

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HunterZ wrote:

Looks like that site waves people away from using DOSBox and talks about running under the NTVDM instead. This won't work for people on 64-bit OSes, which will be everyone eventually.

I know the 64-bit versions can't run 16-bit Windows programs, but is the NTVDM incapable of running DOS programs at all? (Makes the term "NTVDM" a bit of a misnomer.)

EDIT: Right, that's not a VDM in 64-bit.

The anti-DOSBox rationale is explained in http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/virtualpc.html .