bowling, anyone?

[Sponge Belly]

Hi Everyone!

Since Christmas is a time for nostalgia, I thought I'd remind you about Elf Bowling. It was first released by NVision Design back in November, 1999. It instantly went viral and many sequels followed.

But the original is surprisingly difficult to get hold of... until now! There's a link to it on this website that time forgot. Links to lots of other obscure goodies on that site, too. Well worth a browse.

Only thing is, the program is showing its age. Tends to fall over... and bring the rest of Windows down with it. So my question is this: can I run it in a "sandbox" or "protected mode" or whatever you want to call it? Is this a job for the start command? Any suggestions appreciated.

Santa's little elves are depending on you!

[foxidrive]

As a Win32 program with little reliance on a cmd prompt, batch commands aren't going to help.

You can load virtualbox and then install Windows in that - and run Elfbowl in a virtual machine. If it takes down Windows then you can simply restart the VM.

[Sponge Belly]

Happy Christmas All!

Just a quick note to say the link in the OP still works. Also, I’ve moved from XP to Win 7. The game crashes just as frequently as before, only now it doesn’t bring the whole machine down with it. Btw, press Ctrl-X to score a strike every time and Ctrl-D to hit the deer.

Have fun!

- SB

[berserker]

those games are done with old DOS in mind. So the "crash" is expected.

It might (or might not) work if you set the compatibiilty mode as described here.

Also can try installing dosbox etc indicated in the post.

As for downloading older windows version to run your games, a little bit of searching on google you can find.


merry xmas

[Squashman]

I still have Dos and windows 3.11 loaded in a VM. I would think it would run fine in there.

[Ed Dyreen]

Ever had your video-card replaced to find your old game suddenly doesn't display correctly, crashes where it didn't used to or even worse doesn't work at all anymore, even in VM ?

Too often manufacturers and forum members propose updating drivers. Yet the problem may actually be caused by newer video drivers being incompatible. In this case updating drivers is likely to cause more problems. Because virtual drivers are no more than interfaces to physical drivers, running VM won't help either.

Yes you could try Microsoft's standard VGA driver or try the oldest stable driver from your manufacturer. But the easiest solution is physically downgrading to a video card that was popular at the time the game was released. I never got rid of my i386sx.


This revolutionary technology comes with a whopping 11.4 millions instructions per second.

[Sponge Belly]

Happy Christmas, All!

I found a treasure trove of download links to hard-to-find old NStorm games including Frogapult and the first three games in the Elf Bowling series.

Enjoy!

- SB

[brinda]

merry christmas all,

got this in the email today
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.os.msdos.djgpp/VjgvI3MB9Jg

Code: Select all

I made a Qemu/DOS bundle to run my XFDOS package on Windows7/8. More or less as a proof of concept. It also includes a small FreeDOS distro called MetaDOS from Rugxulo.

You can download it here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/fltk-dos/files/Applications/DOS4WIN64_beta1.zip

There is a lot of DOS software that will not run on Windows 7 or 8 in 64bit
mode. To allow DOS applications to be used on these systems they can be
bundled with DOS4WIN64 and started from the disk like any other application
on a Windows 7 or 8 system. No need to install DOSBOX or VMWare first. Or to
burn a Live CD and boot from that.

Just copy the DOS4WIN64 archive files into a directory and start the batch
file to run DOS and the DOS application from there.

So if you made software for DOS you do not want to abandon you could make a
Win8 version with DOS4WIN64.

You could also make a version of this package for Linux and OS X using a different version of Qemu thus making the DOS application "cross platform" ;-)

Without my included XFDOS ISO image this package is just about 5 MB in size.

So if you have a DJGPP application that you want to make available for Windows
7 or 8 in 64 bit mode you could add this to the MetaDOS image in this
package and allow your users to run it on Windows 7 or 8 without installing
any additional emulation packages. If there is a FAT disk available on the PC, this disk can be accessed directly if configured.

Georg