I work for a company which uses an in-house program coded in '86 for Dos. Through the years they have upgraded hardware with mixed results, while keeping the same program (without modification). What is the best way to run DOS-native programs under Win 2k/XP. I have done my research and know that DOS is completely emulated under XP (and not officially supported). What about Win2k? I find the main problems stem from printer drivers having conflicts between the original DOS drivers and the new *spiffy* 32bit windows drivers. Any thoughts?
I'd drop back to DOS 6.22 if I could, but our other programs require 32bit windows to work.
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Win2k il like XP in that Dos is emulated. I've had no problems with this however if your program uses special dos printer drivers you might have to select by trial and error till it works.
Start by picking a basic driver. I have a dos program that only prints if I tell it it is using an HP 550c even though I'm using a very new printer.
I am in a similar situation. At my work, we use an older 16bit program that we run off of a windows 2000 server. The program is run on windows 2k pro desktops. For printing, i just have to capture the disired printer as a LPT port in order for the DOS program to print to it. This even works on networked printers.
DOS programs on a 2k machine are run in that "DOS emulation" mode like on XP.
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