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Frivolous question: run the 1983 MS Word demo?

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First post, by emendelson

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I know perfectly well that DOSBox is for games, not applications, but I'm asking about this here only because I want to play with an old application demo version that can't actually be used for anything. (It won't save files and won't print.)

The demo is the publcly-released demo of Microsoft Word for DOS version 1.0 that was distributed on a floppy disk in a PC World magazine in 1983. It was distributed to anyone who bought the magazine as a free sample, so this is absolutely not pirated or illicit software. A copy of the disk can be found here:

http://toastytech.com/guis/word115.html

It seems to have been written for DOS 1.x and 2.x. It starts up under DOSBox, but locks up at the editing screen. I've tried various ways of slowing it down and using primitive machine types, but haven't been able to get it to run after the editing window appears.

If anyone can figure out some settings that will work with this, I'll be glad to have them.

Reply 1 of 2, by ripsaw8080

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It seems to be working in 0.74 and SVN with default settings, even the mouse works, but it apparently only understands standard keyboard scancodes because enhanced keyboard scancodes cause it to crash (hang). A simple solution to the key problem is machine=pcjr because it filters out the 0xE0 enhanced key signal, but you can also just stay away from enhanced keys (use the numeric keypad cursor keys instead of the independent cursor keys, no F11 or F12, etc.)

Reply 2 of 2, by emendelson

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machine = pcjr was the charm. Thank you!

Earlier, I set up a self-contained version that runs 1.15 successfully, using machine=hercules, which looks terrific. But =hercules didn't help with version 1.0. Thank you again.

The reason I wanted to do this was that one or two readers of a blog post I wrote about Word ( http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/oct … microsoft-word/ ) insisted that styles were not part of the first version of Word. They were.

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