[game_preservation] Windows 7 and Virtual PC XP

[Henry Lowood]

Andrew,

the RIT team that is part of our Library of Congress has been testing 
not XP, but DOS compatibility, as we work on preservation of DOOM (among 
other games).   Andy Phelps from the RIT team concludes, "DOSBox on Win7 
is the best we can get on the modern OS's."  There were still issues 
with drivers.  I'm not sure how much you can conclude from this about 
XP, but it does address early games.

Henry

Andrew Armstrong wrote:

> So I've pre-ordered Windows 7 so it's not rediculously-expensive, 

> instead just man-thats-expensive. It does, it says, come with a 

> virtual way of running apps in an XP environment (I got the Pro or 

> whatever version, but not just for this).

>

> I was wondering, since I don't have the RC installed, does this work 

> at all for any kind of games, or is it purely just the XP API with no 

> real driver support? I know VirtualPC which you can run OS's off is 

> basically like running on a stripped down box with a generic CPU, some 

> RAM and a hard drive, but no graphics or sound support to speak of. I 

> don't know if it is the same way of doing it, simply more built-in to 

> the OS?

>

> I just know some games won't work with 7 (like Vista, since they run a 

> very similar OS model), and virtulising XP might be a cure for that, 

> but only if there is hardware support in it.

>

> I think once I research this a bit more (since as on XP now, I have 

> very few problems running older games) I'll get digging into WINE and 

> also emulator projects (DOSBox is obvious, others that are starting to 

> provide hardware support or 3d emulation are worth looking at too) and 

> might gather some resources for our list (bibliography website still 

> pending ;) ). If anyone has a list of these it'd be welcome, before I 

> get a new PC and slam into the ground running on Vista SP3, I mean, 

> Windows 7 ;)

>

> Thanks!

>

> Andrew

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-- 
Henry Lowood
Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections;
     Film & Media Collections
HRG, Green Library
557 Escondido Mall, Stanford University Libraries
Stanford CA 94305-6004 USA
http://www.stanford.edu/~lowood
lowood at stanford.edu; 650-723-4602

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