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vbox 1.6.2 / Win98: Black screen when opening DOS-Box

Posted: 27. Jul 2008, 18:16
by DocB
On the a.m. machine I installed the vbe9x screen drivers...now I have a black screen each time I open a DOS-Box. Need this to issue a net use... command.

Any idea how this could be prevented? Except from de-installing the driver and switching back to a low resolution?

Posted: 28. Jul 2008, 00:34
by ghr
For what it is worth, some of my experiences:
- around DOS boxes (compare to Win 3.x limitations !, somewhat similar: when opening a DOS box the display seems to become twice as wide; and you end up having two mouse cursors as well). Sometimes a workaround like this is ok: use ctrl+enter twice
- with the ati version, VBE Miniport - Standard PCI Graphics Adapter (VGA) [12-26-2007] and 16 bit colors I was not able to open a DOS prompt (it froze the VM). With 256 colors I do NOT have this problem.

Basically it made me prefer Scitech Display Doctor.

(VirtualBox 1.5.6, vbemp dec. 2007, Win95OSR2).

Posted: 30. Jul 2008, 11:45
by DocB
I downloaded and installed display doctor, but it seems to fail when switching the card to the SDD drivers. Can you tell me the settings that work for you?

Thx!

Posted: 30. Jul 2008, 18:48
by ghr
Oops - little while since I tried (and succesfully installed)... Here are my notes:
[070624] Some notes on using Scitech Display Doctor 7.0 beta (build 340) (sdd) - done using VM WIN95F:
• load SDD
• load ?nucleus driver (under ’TESTS’ - because they need it)
• reboot
• select 1024*768 16 bits colors
• another reboot
• and there you are...

For now I add: best starting position is probably to use the standard Win95 drivers (VGA, or SVGA), not anything else. I remember that installation was a bit tricky and did not seem to be 100% repeatable. On the bright side: once you have it: no problems except loosing the widgets... (small buttons in upper right of window). Workaround for that one: Control Panel > Display > change settings, Apply and next, REFUSE the new ones. That will fix the issue for your current session.

Re: vbox 1.6.2 / Win98: Black screen when opening DOS-Box

Posted: 3. Aug 2008, 05:56
by postfix
DocB wrote:On the a.m. machine I installed the vbe9x screen drivers...now I have a black screen each time I open a DOS-Box. Need this to issue a net use... command.

Any idea how this could be prevented? Except from de-installing the driver and switching back to a low resolution?
As I posted in http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=3603 at Wed Jan 16, 2008 6:52 AM all DOS-Boxes worked well.

I installed the bearwindows vbe driver in Win98SE VB-guest and chanced my graphic resolution as discribed there before. Then I searched all *-PIF-files inside the Win98SE VB-guest and switched the their settings to a "full sized" DOS-Box-Screen with using the "25 lines" mode. And don't forget doing this with the file "_default.pif" in the Win98SE directory ("c:\windows").

After all, all PIF-files works well, even their fall back to from DOS-Box-Mode to Windows98SE-Mode. :-)