First post, by cloverskull
Hey friends,
I've been looking for a way to run old DOS BBS Door games (Legend of the Red Dragon, Tradewars 2002, etc) to serve on my telnet/ssh BBS. dosemu2 is hit or miss, and running old Windows has been problematic on the hardware I'm hoping to use, which is primarily low-power-consumption small form factor PCs.
Interestingly, I got Windows 7 32 bit to run on an Intel NUC, but it turns out NTVDM breaks when using an Intel GPU. I somehow hit this bizarre edge case, against all odds, which sucks to say the least.
Nevertheless, someone on these forums recommended checking out ArcaOS, which is a further iteration of OS/2 Warp 4.52 with some changes to work on more modern hardware. And...it works! I got it to install, run, connect to the internet, use FireFox. It feels relatively speedy and I notice it is pretty light on resources. Score! Although it _is_ expensive, so that's the definite downside. And there's no "demo" license, either.
Now, I'm trying to wrap my head around how the DOS and Windows compatibility layers work. Should I just be able to run a 32 bit Windows program directly in ArcaOS or do I need to fire up the Win3.1 built in thing and run it in there? And how would I go about running these DOS doors if I do this?
Well, thanks for reading. Hope this is in an appropriate section. I'll be honest, so far, ArcaOS has been quite a bit of fun getting to know.