Masters of Orion II

gregebowman · #1 August 6th, 2009, 06:43 PM

I was wondering if there is a way to run Masters of Orion 2 using a Vista OS. I thought I'd try installing it today but couldn't get it to work. Anyone have any ideas?

Arralen · #2 August 7th, 2009, 09:00 AM

DOSBox

Xrati · #3 August 7th, 2009, 10:07 AM

Doesn't Vista have a compatability set in the properities menu? Set it to run under Win95.

Fyron · #4 August 7th, 2009, 12:21 PM

Compatibility mode almost never works for DOS programs (esp. games), in my experience.

If MOO2 is 16 bit, it cannot ever run inside Vista (or any future OS), due to the lack of 16 bit binaries. DOSBox is likely the best solution.

Arralen · #5 August 7th, 2009, 02:24 PM

Actually, running the DOS version of MoO2 in DOSBox is the best solution, as the DOS version is more stable than the Win95 version and DOSBox can even "translate" the IPX networking to TCP/IP ...
You may want to check out The Orion Nebula ...

Atrocities · #6 August 7th, 2009, 11:59 PM

I sincerely hope that windows 7 is backwards computable. There are so many good games, applications, and software out there that don't run on Vista that shouldn't be tossed into the waste bin because MicroSoft is too willfully ignorant of our peoples needs.

Santiago · #7 August 8th, 2009, 08:24 AM

Windows 7 is not really directly backwards compatibile. Apparently it will use virtualization to hopefully accomplish compatibilty. It will probably work with more mainstream programs than ones that aren't but I think it will be hit or miss personally. Time will tell.

Windows 7 is a bit more than just a Vista fix. But MS isn't really ignorant of needs but it becomes a tradeoff. How much windows bloat to be able to run most old software while trying to keep the pc efficient and fast. Or just start over.

It's like those stupid gum commercials where the person is chewing the same piece of gum forever. The gum company sales drop thru the floor and they resort to ambushing the gumchewers to get their gum back and force the person to buy a new piece. While to an extent this is funny, it is also very very true. If you don't keep up with your competitors and keep selling new items for lower cost, then you're out of business. True for MS and ANY other company out there. It's the world we live in.

Xrati · #8 August 8th, 2009, 10:49 AM

You mean to tell me that Micro$oft

can't come up with an emulation program to run within Win 7, to get old games running.

Sooooooooo DosBox will be the only method to run older programs... I wish the people over at DosBox could come up with an OS, I'd buy it!

Fyron · #9 August 8th, 2009, 04:44 PM

MS has been including emulation wrappers in every version of Windows since NT 3.51... but let's just hate on them some more, mmm'kay? Developing and maintaining these intrinsically incompatible emulation wrappers is expensive, and at some point older OSes have to be dropped due to lack of profitable customer demand. Whole-OS virtualization is extremely primitive for everything outside of core OS runtimes. Anything at all to do with 3D rendering is either non-existent, or in early alpha stages in every virtualization technology out there (including the MS-owned Virtual PC). Providing a virtual machine to run DX8 and older games could be of value to Microsoft, given that there is still a market for such products that their home customers can benefit from, but why should they waste resources supporting 15+ year old DOS games in the core OS that almost 0% of the market cares about? There aren't any enterprise customers that need to be able to run them, and they have always been the major driver behind MS spending vast resources supporting "compatibility modes" and the like.

It's actually for the best that they canned all of the 16-bit runtime files in Vista; really old garbage needs to be phased out for the core OS to progress past the horrible state of software of the early 90s. For everyone involved, it's better to leave the extreme niche market of ancient software emulation to niche vendors (ala DOSBox). It will be a glorious day in the future when MS can finally delete all traces of GDI from Windows c. 2025.

Arralen · #10 August 9th, 2009, 09:03 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Xrati

I wish the people over at DosBox could come up with an OS, I'd buy it!

Not the same people, but they're working together with the WINE developers, and there might be some connections to DOSBox (but I haven't checked..):

ReactOS - a free, modern operating system based on the design of Windows® XP/2003. Written completely from scratch, it aims to follow the Windows® architecture designed by Microsoft from the hardware level right through to the application level. This is not a Linux based system, and shares none of the unix architecture.

If you're looking for a "real" DOS, you might want to check out :
FreeDOS - a free DOS-compatible operating system for IBM-PC compatible systems. FreeDOS is made of up many different, separate programs that act as "packages" to the overall FreeDOS Project.