Monthly Archives: October 2011

Is it so hard to document things?

A few weeks ago I spent a bit of time debugging a program which mysteriously failed under DOS 3.3, although it worked without any apparent problem on DOS 4.0 and later, and there was no indication that it required anything … Continue reading

Posted in DOS | 66 Comments

Running 1-2-3 R3 in a VM

I recently tried to install the infamous Lotus 1-2-3 Release 3 from 1989 in a VM. The program disks included both DOS and OS/2 executables, and both were failing. The DOS version stopped with “Cannot initialize system driver” immediately after … Continue reading

Posted in DOS, PC history, VirtualBox | 3 Comments

Need for Speed SE video glitch

When attempting to play the classic racing game Need for Speed SE in a virtualized environment (VirtualBox), I was dismayed to discover that all the in-game videos were completely garbled. Curiously, the introductory video played when the game is first … Continue reading

Posted in DOS, VirtualBox | 7 Comments