Anyone know if and how you can run DOS games in XP. I know some will just run anyway - through a DOS shell (command prompt). But certain games open up the DOS window and do the setup bit OK, but then get stuck on the startup screen.

This is a friends PC, he said it did it on quake and one other game I can't remember. He's just bought a new PC with XP on it and can't run any of his games. With Win 98 at least you could shut down and restart in DOS (without any windows drivers but never mind), with XP you can't even do that.

Create a shortcut to the game, then right click and set the comp-atibility mode. Had to do this for a few dos apps, but not tried it with games. Should follow the same principle though.

Otherwise, you could use a dos boot disk I suppose.

As stu has said,

But dont get your hopes up. You will be trying to run the games in an Emulated Dos environment, and I know from experience, not many games will run in it, no matter how much you play with the compatibility settings.

Best bet would be a Dos boot disk, with all the drivers that you require, to run the game. But this will not work if you have a NTFS partition.

Windows has now evolved so much, that dos is now becoming obsolete. (I still use it via "Command" and "CMD" common So much easier to manipulate the system :) )

So much for William Gates statement, about making sure that windows will always be backwards compatible, and 640K will be enough for any program :)

also in a lot of cases, the DOS program will work on clock cycles rather than a timer, and so a particularly fast PC will cause division by zero errors.

There is a way to slow down the virtual clock cycles in the Dos emulated environment from XP, but I cannot remember where. I will find it tomorrow.