Running WordStar 2000 Under Windows 98: Solution

[Gene Wirchenko]

     For the past several months, I have tried to get WordStar 2000 running on my Windows 98 system at work.  None of the proffered solutions worked for me.  I still do not know why.

    I recently started doing programming by shutting down to DOS to edit and restarting Windows to test my app.  Irony: It is a GUI app.

    Finally, it occurred to me to try searching for a DOS emulator that runs under Windows.  I was really wondering if such a program would exist, but it turns out that gamers have had this problem.  I am now experimenting with DOSBox.  It has a few quirks and minor problems, but it appears quite usable.  That is good, because I was tired of rebooting so often.

    My system runs at 500 MHz.  I note that a long search in WordStar is slower, though not unusably so.  I have not tuned DOSBox much yet, so I might be able to squeeze out some more speed.

    You can download DOSBox from
         http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

[Gene Wirchenko]

    For the past several months, I have tried to get WordStar 2000 running on my Windows 98 system at work.  None of the proffered solutions worked for me.  I still do not know why.

I am now experimenting with DOSBox.  It has a few quirks and minor problems, but it appears quite usable.

A follow-up: I continue to use DOSBox to run WordStar.  It has some awkward bits, but it works.  I still keep a DOS window open for executing DOS commands, because the default shell of DOSBox does not support too many of them.  Apparently, one can boot an operating system of choice.  I have not bothered getting into it that much.

The arrow keys are not as responsive as I want.  I find that I am using ^A and ^F a lot more now.

One nice touch is that I can edit multiple files at once again.  For some reason, on my home system, I can only edit one file at a time if I want to be able to save my changes.  If I edit a second file at the time, when I save, WordStar throws an error about a temp file and I lose my changes.  No such problem under DOSBox.

I could probably have things running even better if I wanted to dig deeply enough into it, but this is quite usable.  I am much happier now using WordStar than Something Else.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko