I’m wondering whether a clean install worked more efficiently versus an upgraded install.
One can emulate with the others, sure, but not all equal. Accuracy is a comparison benchmark
>This is what I like about emulation and playing around with those systems so much.
Why the author chose Dosbox-X to try to run Windows XP? It sounds like Because They Can.
This makes me very much want to tinker with DosBox myself.
Qemu can IIRC do similar things with drivers but possibly because it was co-opted to run android emulator imgs (which are all very standard and boring), it seemed difficult to tinker with custom drivers and emulated hardware.
The above could just be my own inexperience talking, but examples are one of the best ways to learn, if DosBox-X takes extra care that's noteworthy at least.
It's probably also a great way to find bugs.
If you install the "Recommended" build of DOSBox-X from the website, then proceed to install the default "Visual Studio build (64-bit)", you get buggy and inaccurate CPU emulation.
How do you know it's buggy and inaccurate? Run QBasic, and PRINT VAL("5"). You get 4.99999999999.
But...
You get the correct result if you are using a 32-bit build. You get the correct result on all non-MSVC builds. You get the correct result if you have the Dynamic core selected, even on 64-bit MSVC builds. It's just 64-bit MSVC builds with any core other than the Dynamic core that give the wrong result.
So what's going on here?
MSVC 64-bit doesn't support 80-bit floating point math, and doesn't allow you to use inline assembly to manually run the 80-bit floating point instructions. Instead, floating point operations are truncated down to 64-bit.
I think that the MSVC 64-bit build should NOT be the default build recommended to users for just that reason.
(/s, of course, but you get the idea – more control.)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FxHyofXglI&pp=ygUQd2luZG93c...
The classic example is the earlier Wing Commander games - run them on anything faster than the period correct 286/386 CPUs that were out at the time of release, the games timing/speed gets severely messed up. DosBox has nice features to let you control the CPU speed to try and make these games work again.
Software such as Wing Commander were never tested/designed originally to run on faster CPUs that didn't exist back then and software timing can sometimes only be correct on very specific chips and clockspeeds.
Here with XP, its just cool - not a practical or performant choice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuFNFd8I0WU&t=680s
BTW, I remember playing Wing Commander way back in the day. No game sucked me in like that before or since.
Even Captain Obvious himself is going to sigh something fierce.
I run and maintain some old 386/486 boxes as a hobby - I honestly don't think its worth it for almost anyone, DosBox will be just fine for 99% of people.
I agree that the low-level explanation is lacking, but in fairness dosbox-x doesn't sound like it offers that (out of the box).
I'm guessing what happened, the boot sector etc. were installed by 98, win2k had some way of converting from FAT32 to NTFS, and the winxp installer just sets some flags and dumps install files on disk somewhere.
Getting all that from "it's the NT conversion" is a stretch, but.
Note that I was totally skipping the text-based installation stage when upgrading from Windows 2000 while I got it when starting the installation from Windows 98 - that's where the "NT conversion, stupid!"-theory came from.
It’s important to realize that Windows XP was the successor both to the NT line (Windows NT/2000) as well as to the DOS-based consumer-oriented line (Windows 95/98/ME), hence upgrading from Windows 98 to Windows XP is the natural path, whereas upgrading to Windows 2000 in between is kind of a detour.
Very enjoyable. I was overjoyed seeing shots of 3D pinball.
Crazy! Playing right now, so happy. Reverse engineering and the people who practice it are legends.
But just last month, when I installed Windows 2000 on a new-old-stock laptop from 2008 (which was surprisingly challenging as well), I realized that it does start to feel retro by now…
Of course those plans never materialized, even after we all installed WfW 3.11.
It is wild to me that Windows 3.1's system requirements were 1MB of RAM and 6.5MB of disk space. Things have changed...
Windows XP on the other hand...
Behind a NAT it may be fine, but you still have to be very careful
The menu bar was in the same place in every application. Short-cuts were consistent between apps. I didn't have to contend with four different version of the file browser to open a file, or "Show more options" on right-click to get a non-idiot-proof context menu. Icons were high contrast, there were text descriptions and tools tips (instead of cryptic grey-on-grey icons), short-cut combinations were actually included in the menus, and almost every application had a help file!
Can we go back to that, please?
Thank the "web-devs"... instead of having native looking apps that use OS controls/widgets they want to push dumb html/css/js to "unlease their creativity"... I'm sorry but huge middle finger to you.
I want all my apps to use the same widgets and paradigme and look the same...
All because the marketing suite can't stand not getting their fingers in something. I want to see the fucking study that says having the buttons on iOS the same shape as the ones on the website adds any number of dollars to the bottom line. C'mon, this is important enough to spend a bunch of money on, slow development, and also make UX worse, must have a good reason for it, right? Surely it's not just an exec who's never done the actual job pushing things for vanity purposes, or a variety of roles padding their portfolios, or needing to market this to toddler-like C-suiters inside the company on some damn powerpoint, right? LOL.
But then, for as much as we pretend to be data-driven in business and pay lip service to various science-adjacent notions and think we've really got it all figured out, mooooost of it falls apart if you poke at it a little and it all starts to look very fad and social-proof driven. So I guess just add this to the list of weird stuff companies do for maybe-bad reasons.
Amen.
Just find an old Windows VM and put Winamp next to Sonique next to RealPlayer next to Windows Media Player next to QuickTime -- those sure were the days, until the damn "creatives" came with their stupid "web tech."
Windows XP did allow apps to do some crazy things, though not sure how much of that was unique to XP vs legacy APIs.
I know the 3D effects are considered dated now, but I found them very useful from a separation PoV.
To the extent that the OS does anything at all, I'm usually just mildly annoyed, like it signing be out of my work VPN or forgetting how my monitors are arranged. Or eating the battery when it should be sleeping (though I understand there's been some historical finger-pointing between Dell and Microsoft about whose actual fault those issues are).
Seriously. Who demonized having legible color icons in exchange for blurry grayscale icons?
They have such a charm and special style that only works through their low pixel count, but if you would pixelate icons today it would just look gimmicky and out of place with the rest of the OS.
I still vividly remember such simple but delightful things as the Excel icon, or the icon of a stylized 386 processor for the System category in Control Panel.
Susan Kare did a lot of those! I love how they're just as expressive at 16-colors as at higher color depths. https://www.stardock.com/blog/502254/the-evolution-of-comput...
> Provide icons for all ribbon controls except drop-down lists, check boxes, and radio buttons. Most commands will require both 32x32 and 16x16 pixel icons (only 16x16 pixel icons are used by the Quick Access Toolbar). Galleries typically use 16x16, 48x48, or 64x48 pixel icons.
> Be sure to test your windows in 96 dpi (100 percent) at 800x600 pixels, 120 dpi (125 percent) at 1024x768 pixels, and 144 dpi (150 percent) at 1200x900 pixels. Check for layout problems, such as clipping of controls, text, and windows, and stretching of icons and bitmaps.
> Icons are pictorial representations of objects, important not only for aesthetic reasons as part of the visual identity of a program, but also for utilitarian reasons as shorthand for conveying meaning that users perceive almost instantaneously. Windows Vista® introduces a new style of iconography that brings a higher level of detail and sophistication to Windows.
> Icons have a maximum size of 256x256 pixels, making them suitable for high-dpi (dots per inch) displays. These high- resolution icons allow for high visual quality in list views with large icons.
> In the smaller sizes, the same icon may change from perspective to straight-on. At the size of 16x16 pixels and smaller, render icons straight-on (front-facing). For larger icons, use perspective.
> Icon files require 8-bit and 4-bit palette versions as well, to support the default setting in a remote desktop. These files can be created through a batch process, but they should be reviewed, as some will require retouching for better readability.
Nice icons were destroyed after high-DPI support, for some unknown-to-me reason.
I had the "Student Edition" and you could trim down all the services to the point that you would have a running OS using just 18 processes. Linux at the time could not compete with that. (Of course, things have changed a lot since then).
I'm surprised Skype used to be functional, post Microsoft acquisition I remember constantly fiddling with it to run consistently on fairly recent versions of Ubuntu on a 4th gen i5 latitude.
From a security and robustness POV, surely /more/ process separation is a good thing?
In Linux it was usually pretty obvious what daemon did what on a somewhat well curated system, though. No svchost.exe, and no gargantuan system processes or a kernel overstepping its boundaries.
Of course, that’s very different nowadays…
So did you actually know what services were running based on the processes to support the belief that "there were no other processes acting in the background"?
Ever used Win 7? Way better, and not a candy UI.
I type this comment from old Ubuntu Mate system, but my next system is going to be Debian-based.
If Microsoft had a champion of UI consistency I think it'd be Windows 2000, but I wouldn't know from experience. I was given a Windows ME prebuilt.
After that, change for the sake of change started ti creep in and then accelerated.
Windows XP had the Luna UI with its Fisher Price color scheme and OSX moved to the lickabke Aqua UI.
Yes, this was purely a "why not?!" project, it doesn't really make sense and using VMware or true low-level emulation like 86Box is a way better option than using completely unsupported software.
Currently going through your comments...
The game is almost 25 years old (ow, my bones) I don't think anyone would bat an eye if you circumvented the DRM
Virtual CloneDrive will run The Sims (and other early SafeDisc titles) without issue. By contrast I don't believe that any emulator (QEMU/Virtualbox/DOSbox/etc) handle the weird I/O calls that DRM makes
And then there are people who do not read the ToS and then there's also nobody else.
I miss the simplicity of windows xp. sometimes.
Performs an installation of or upgrade to a product in the Windows Server 2003 family.
If you have hardware that is compatible with a product in the Windows Server 2003 family,
you can run winnt at a Windows 3.X or MS-DOS command prompt.