Running Legacy Software on other Operating Systems

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Introduction

When running legacy Software on a different host operating system, a mixture of Virtual Machines and different operating systems may be used to achieve this.

For the purpose of this section the OS that is being used is Windows 8 64-bit. Windows has a function called compatibility mode. This allows the user to drop to a different number of bits, so that older Windows programs can still be run. The compatibility mode does not work with all programs, so this section explores how to get around that problem.

The main reason for the incompatibility is the number of bits (8-16-32 or 64) that the Operating System uses. See this article for further details.

These programs are the ones we wish to use

Program	Use	Operating System
PipeDream	To share Files from the Z88	DOS 8-bit
Smartsuite	to convert spreadsheet files	Windows NT
WordStar to PipeDream	to convert Wordprocesser files	DOS 8-bit
PipeDream to WordStar	to convert Wordprocesser files	DOS 8-bit

Using the table below

Smartsuite can be installed on Windows 8 64bit directly
PipeDream, Word to PipeDream, PipeDream to WordStar need a virtual machine

If a Windows 32-bit machine is used, no virtual machine is required.

		64 bit Windows Operating systems
		64-bit Operating Systems can run programs on 32 bit systems
64-bit	64-bit	64-bit	64-bit

8-bit DOS		32-bit Windows Operating systems
		32-bit Operating Systems can run programs on 16 bit systems
	32-bit	32-bit
			16-bit
		16-bit Operating systems
8-bit

This gives the following options to run DOS 8-bit:-

Host Operating System		Target Operating System
		DOS 8-bit
		Windows NT