So I found my copy of XP and installed a virtual machine of it on my vista box. Running XP in a virtual machine does have it’s disadvantages, at least using VirtualBox. For fun I decided to try to run the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure on it first, sort of like how I tried running it first on Vista to find (or rather, sadly, confirm) that DOS stuff was right out on 64bit platform. Unfortunately, under the XP VM, the whole thing died taking the VM manager with it, which is pretty crappy. A bug was logged with Sun a year ago and I guess it’s not a priority, as everything still seems to run under DosBox.

Can I just say thank bob for DosBox? If it weren’t for that, my parents new computer wouldn’t be usable as a backup for my mother if her work computer dies. Dosbox provides a valuable service that Microsoft seems unwilling to provide. Which is unfortunate, fine, but also kind of weird. I mean, who better than they to provide this, even if not baked into windows but as a side-along app like Dosbox? And I’ll quote something from The Old New Thing

Why 16-bit DOS and Windows are still with us

Many people are calling for the abandonment of 16-bit DOS and 16-bit Windows compatibility subsystems. And trust me, when it comes time to pull the plug, I’ll be fighting to be the one to throw the lever. (How’s that for a mixed metaphore.)
But that time is not yet here.
You see, folks over in the Setup and Deployment group have gone and visited companies around the world, learned how they use Windows in their businesses, and one thing keeps showing up, as it relates to these compatibility subsystems: Companies still rely on them. Heavily.
Every Company has its own collection of line-of-business (LOB) applications. These are programs that the company uses for its day-to-day business, programs the company simply cannot live without. …
The LOB application is the deal-breaker. If a Windows upgrade breaks a LOB application, it’s game over. No upgrade. No company is going to lose a program that is critical to their business.
And it happens that a lot of these LOB applications are 16-bit programs. Some are DOS. Some are 16-bit programs written in some ancient version of Visual Basic.
…
Perhaps with a big enough carrot, these companies could be convinced to undertake the effort (abd risk!) of porting (or in the case of lost source code and/or expertise, rewriting from scratch) their LOB applications.
But it’ll have to be a really big carrot.
Real example: Just this past weekend I was visiting a friend who lived in a very nice, professionally managed apartment complex. We had occasional to go to the office, and I caught a glimpse of their computer screen. The operating system was Windows XP. And the program they were running to do their apartment management? It was running in a DOS box.

Chen, R (2007). The Old New Thing:Practical development throughout the evolution of windows. Boston,MA: Pearson Education, Inc.

For simple consumers not interested in building their own computers (like my parents), seems that the carrot is actually more of a stick. See, if you just walk into a big box store like Futureshop trying to get a simple desktop computer, all you can get now is 64bit machine with 64bit vista. Dell is pretty much like this too (though the last I checked, you could still try to get 32bit Vista, but I don’t think it’s DOS support is all there, if at all). So really I guess it’s businesses that get to hang onto their stuff for a while longer, since businesses are the big important thing. My mother is her own business, and it needed WordPerfect 5.1. Oh well, apparently. So again, thankfully Dosbox picks up the pieces for us. At least so far, I’m still holding my breath until such time as she actually tries to use it fully to see if it all works.

But anyway, at least with this XP VM I can remote desktop to work, which pretty much covers all I needed, so I guess I can ditch this old crashy XP machine, except that it has all my stuff… grr. Oh, and I decided to install my Space Quest collection Alicia got me on the XP VM, set up the sound card, and try to play it. It actually works, and the sound as well (though that took a few tries). I’m amused that it installs it’s own copy of Dosbox though, hehe.

Click for larger image

So here is Space Quest 1 VGA running on the XP VM in the top left
Worms running in a previously installed Ubuntu install on the top right
VLC on the host playing an episode of Father Ted, for fun
CPU graph showing all is well on the host, Vista.