(meteorobs) Next meteor shower and call for observation ofcomet 209P

grs_longs at Safe-mail.net grs_longs at Safe-mail.net
Thu Oct 4 05:34:47 EDT 2012


-------- Original Message --------
From: "Jay Salsburg" <jsalsburg at bellsouth.net>

> Hello
> 
> If you are having trouble with DOS Apps running them on Windows 7 or 8 - 32
> and 64 bit, you can run them without difficulty inside a Virtual environment
> provided by the Free App called DOSBox. There are 2 versions, the
> unsupported "Megabuild" version has a hook to allow printing.

Thanks for that.  Yep, I've had some success with dosbox for some old dos stuff, including of all things running the GEM environment under windows so I can run an old graphics based binary star orbit plotter I cobbled together years ago and which I can't figure out how to program it graphically in any other language.

I still haven't tried it with the old numerical integrating software because that seems to use "illegal screen memory access", that is it seems to poke the screen directly, and in EGA of all things (showing how old it is!).  I could never get it to run in linux dosboxes for instance.  It used to eat up cpu and make the system crash at times even when I could get it to work in dos!  And I'm not familiar with the mathematics it is performing, so I keep putting it off.

But anyway, yes I agree, DOSbox is very good for those old bits of astronomical software that won't play on new systems but have esseentially never been replaced with anything and/or only have relatively expensive alternatives only (compared to the amount of use they get), but are still essential when they _are_ needed.

Cheers

John


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