• NXVDM project / walkthrough

    From Nick Andre@1:229/426 to All on Sun Feb 2 22:33:36 2020
    Everyone,

    I forgot to mention, you can download this from my website. Its not necessary to compile anything but it was tricky to hunt this down:

    https://www.net229.org/misc/ntvdmx64.7z

    Use WinRar or something to unzip to a temporary directory. I would strongly recommend disabling UAC or run with Admin rights.

    On Windows 10 it may be necessary to enable 16-bit application support before installing. Try following these steps:

    https://www.groovypost.com/howto/enable-16-bit-application-support-windows-10/

    On Windows Server 2012R2, 2016 and 2019, or if your Windows 10 has issues
    with the above, then it may be necessary to enable 16-bit application support in Group Policy (disable the prevention setting) before installing NXVDM:

    - Windows-key+R, GPEDIT.MSC
    Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Application Compatibility

    Also before installing, you most likely will need AUTOEXEC.NT and CONFIG.NT from 32-bit Windows, and you can also grab these from my site. Unzip these
    in \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32

    https://www.net229.org/misc/ntfiles.zip

    *Now* you can go ahead and install NXVDM. Be sure to run the installer as Administrator. You must reboot the computer when prompted.

    When your computer has rebooted, fire up a CMD prompt and run EDIT. You should have the DOS EDIT blue-screen editor running.

    You can now *seamlessly* run 16-bit DOS programs on your 64-bit Windows without Dosbox, Dosemu, Vdos or whatever emulators.

    Now at this point, if you have it all working, then we move on to where I'm stuck at which is the Fossil driver stuff. NET2BBS / NETFOSS does not appear
    to work on 64-bit Windows. It appears the DLL cannot be found no matter
    where I try to place it. I have emailed the author, no reply yet. I
    strongly suspect that the NETFOSS.DLL has to be recompiled for 64-bit.

    Here is what I have succcesfully tested working on Windows Server 2019:

    - D'Bridge
    - Searchlight
    - Renegade
    - TBBS/Flame 2.3
    - MakeNL and all 16-bit related archiver / compilers / Turbo Pascal stuff

    Nick

    --- Renegade vY2Ka2
    * Origin: Joey, do you like movies about gladiators? (1:229/426)
  • From Kurt Weiske@1:218/700 to Nick Andre on Wed Feb 5 07:00:00 2020
    Nick Andre wrote to All <=-

    You can now *seamlessly* run 16-bit DOS programs on your 64-bit Windows without Dosbox, Dosemu, Vdos or whatever emulators.

    This is great news! I have the BBS running in 32-nbit Windows 10 on a system that has 8 gb of RAM. I'd love to be able to use the extra RAM and convert
    the BBS to 64-bit.

    I'd been following this package but didn't have the time to dig into it - thanks for sharing your research with us.




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