First post, by Lady Eklipse
Hello,
I'd like to share my experience with Windows 95 OSR 2.5 DOS and compatibility issues.
I have built a retro system with DOS 6.22, solved conventional memory issues, installed drivers and most games worked fine, alas without MPU-401 emulation on AWE64 Gold. So I decided to upgrade it to Windows 95 for MPU-401 and FAT32. I already have a Windows 98 machine and I wanted to get experience of setting up and using Windows 95.
Generally it is thought that DOS 7.1 is 100% compatible with DOS 6.22.
BUT DOS 7.0, which Windows 95 is reported to have, is apparently not.
I've read these topics before posting:
How (in)compatible MS-DOS 7 is?
"Pure" DOS benefits over Windows MS-DOS Mode?
One person reported Epic Pinball not working properly in DOS 7.
I'd like to mention that I've proved through experiments that BioMenace does NOT work in MSDOS 7.0. The game freezes as soon as you kill an enemy.
I've tested that game on the same system with Windows 98 and it worked fine!
I've tested that game on another system (Socket A build) with Windows 95 and it has the same bug!
I've read this topic and found a fix intended for DOSBox emulator and it fixed my problem, BioMenace works fine in Windows 95 DOS mode:
Biomenace does NOT work (in version 0.63)
I'm not familiar with Windows 95 architecture, I had a lot of experience with Windows 98 and recently - DOS 6.22.
The only thing I know 100% now is that there IS sense in building a pure DOS 6.22 machine, so issues like this don't come up.I'd be very interested in your opinions why exactly does this happen, is DOS 7.0 really the worse DOS version than 6.22 and 7.1?