How to force a dos game to run in a window in XP???

[yoda313]

I'm trying to do an avi video grab of an old dos game but I can't force it to play in a window. If I play the game in full screen the recording program will only capture the sound and not the video.

I've tried dosbox but its too slow and won't run properly (I have a celeron 2.66ghz emachine). The game runs perfectly at full screen when I have memory set to auto and use VDM sound. But I can't force the game to play in a window. I even right cliked and checked the tabs for "window" and run at 640x480 resolution. But it still pops up at full screen.

How can I force XP to play the dos game in a window????

[yoda313]

Hmm.... Looks like I might not be able to do this:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb%3BEN-US%3Bq101708

An MS-DOS-based graphical application cannot run in a window on a computer with an Intel microprocessor. This restriction is caused by the overhead involved in trapping register and memory accesses from the VGA areas to the VDM (virtual MS-DOS machine) to emulate the graphics hardware in software; the graphics performance would be too low for the application to be useful. Therefore, when an application switches into graphics mode, the VDM switches to full-screen mode.



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[smearbrick1]

DOSBox is only as slow as you make it. You can actually bump the speed of DOSBox. If you check the help file, you can find out how to do this. Besides, a Celeron 2.66 should be able to handle a DOS emulator. I ran QUAKE for DOS at full speed using DOSBox. You shouldn't have a problem.

[yoda313]

Really???? I'll have to give it another try. Thanks

[yoda313]

Thanks smearbrick1 that was it!!! It wasnt the cpu power I needed to boost it was the frameskip feature. I nudged it up a few ticks and it played smoothly! I was able to capture the window with my avi screen recorder and I got a perfect divx out of it! Thanks a ton.

[smearbrick1]

Very good.