• 16-bit DOS doors on 64-bit Windows

    From Digital Man@VERT to All on Wednesday, December 01, 2021 20:18:22
    A new method of running 16-bit DOS door (e.g. games) on Synchronet for Windows on a 64-bit (x64) edition of Windows is now available in the current development build (v3.19a) for Windows:
    ftp://ftp.synchro.net/sbbs_dev.zip

    You'll need to install NTVDMx64 first (for 64-bit editions of Windows 7 through Windows 10):
    http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/ntvdmx64.html
    (in short, download and extract http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/ntvdmx64-ccpu-fre.7z and then run usa/install.bat as administrator)

    And then you should be able to re-enable DOS program support in Synchronet (make sure that NO_DOS is not included in your sbbs.ini [bbs] Options line) and voila: 16-bit DOS doors (that use UART, FOSSIL, or stdio) will work.

    The doors may not run *quite* as fast as they would in a 32-bit Windows NTVDM (which takes advantage of the i386's V86 mode), but they'll likely run noticeably faster than when running inside a VM on top of a 64-bit version of Windows.

    Of course, this is a brand new "feature" for Synchronet, so caveat emptor and all that, but it's working great here at vert.synchro.net (Win10-64).
    --
    digital man

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