Old 16bit DOS programs on Windows 7 (x64)

We needed to execute an old-but-working 16bits program to locate earthquakes called “HypoEllipse” (source), but calling it from the Windows 7 x64 boxes resulted in a nice :

Bam ! Not working, sorry for you…

No ! I say No ! Some great guys developed “DosBOX”:

a super emulator for old-but-working DOS applications ! All you have is to download and install the application from their sourceforge.net.and configure it 🙂

Say, my hypoel.exe porgram is located in the folder “C:\Users\thomas\Desktop\hypo”, to ease my work, I’ll add this path to the startup of the DosBOX. To do that, go to the installation folder (C:\Program Files (x86)\DOSBox-0.74) and execute DOSBox 0.74 Options.bat. The end of the content of the ini file defines the [autoexec] part:

[autoexec]
# Lines in this section will be run at startup.
# You can put your MOUNT lines here.

Replace with those lines:

[autoexec]
# Lines in this section will be run at startup.
# You can put your MOUNT lines here.

keyb be
mount h c:/Users/thomas/Desktop/hypo

At startup, the [autoexec] will be executed: keyb be will define the keyboard layout to Belgian French and the mount instruction will mount the path to hypo to drive letter h:.

Then, open DOSbox, and, once loaded, type h: to change directory to the hypo folder:

The old dir command will list the content of the folder :

to increase the velocity of the emulator, you can hit CTRL-F12 several times (visible in the output console of the emulator):

That’s all, folkes !