A Frequently Asked Question is, "How can I run Obsession Off-Line on my new Windows XP machine?". While it can't cover every possiblity, this is a survey of that topic. (Note that I am unqualified to answer the question, "How can I run Obsession Off-Line on my Mac?"). None of this discussion is approved or supported by ETC.
The answer may depend on whether you use the most current, or an earlier version of Obsession Off-Line. If you have a very new PC, it's possible that you do not have enough access to the BIOS settings for memory paging to get any version for Obsession I to run. In that case, your only options are to get an older machine, or to get a virtual machine (likely, running in Windows) that can run DOS (or a DOS-like operating system) for you.
Another obstacle is that modern PC's (especially those delivered with Windows XP pre-installed) are likely to have NTFS partitions on their hard drive. The problem is that ancient DOS programs cannot even see that those hard drives exist.
The last big obstacle is that you probably need an operating system to install on your machine. I happen to own legal, purchased copies of DOS (both versions 5 and 6) that I can use. I'm certainly not going to suggest that you (as Abbie Hoffman wrote) "Steal This Book". So I'll mention that if you can't find an old, legitimate copy of DOS, you might consider modern replacements. Some of them are free and/or open source. You can also use Windows 95 or 98, if you have a legal copy. But you'll want to enable the Windows Boot Menu so that you can start directly in DOS, and not have to wait for two boots (Win 9x, and then DOS). Alternatively, you can make a "DOS Boot Diskette" in Windows, which will allow you to boot directly into DOS by having it in the floppy drive when you turn on the machine.
Please Note: This is advanced PC setup work! I can't be responsible for anything that happens to your PC. Please read all instructions and back up everything that's irreplaceable on your machine. Make sure you can restore your system in some way if there's a disaster.
With the understanding that they are tricky solutions, making the most of a bad situation, and that it's hard to decide what the best choice is for "every" user, here are some of the ways to run Obsession Off-Line (O-O-L) on an XP machine. I've listed them from the "simplest" to the "more complicated" methods. There's no doubt that the frequent suggestion of finding a discarded, old DOS (or Win 95/98) machine is the easiest way, and it's likely to be very cheap, too. But you need extra desk space.
The basic issues are that O-O-L has to be able to read and write in the directory where the program itself is located, and that DOS programs can't see NTFS volumes at all. Also be aware that the file paths are hard-coded into the program. That means you must use the "normal" directory structure O-O-L expects to find. One way to make sure of that is to use the ETC-provided installation instructions for the version of O-O-L you're using.
1) Normally, an "off the shelf" XP machine has its' hard disk formatted with NTFS. That is the only way to access "huge" drives, it's the most efficient in the use of disk space, and it has the best security. But if you were to get a new machine, or had to replace the hard drive with a new one that wasn't "huge", you could format it with the old FAT-32 system. That way, a native DOS program (like O-O-L) could run, and use the hard drive directly. Frankly, hard drives are so big today that this is not a really practical solution.
If you do manage to do this, note that you can create an MS-DOS boot diskette with WinXP. It's done with the same right-click on A: that you would use in Win95 or Win98. Setting aside the problem with NTFS hard disks, I was able to run both Obsession Off-Line 3.1.2 and 4.2 from this boot diskette. That's a way that WinXP users with only one OS on their hard drive can run O-O-L. (See next section.)
2) Whatever file system your hard drive has, if you buy an outboard ZIP drive (I used a ZIP 100 Parallel Port unit, which is very cheap these days), you can boot to a DOS floppy and run an IOMEGA program called GUEST, which allows DOS access to the ZIP drive. I've run O-O-L this way, on a laptop with an NTFS hard drive and WinXP. It's cumbersome, but at least it works. And you have a Zip drive for backup...
Because rebooting takes so long, I usually boot my Win98 machines to a DOS floppy when I'm going to run Obsession Off-Line. If you put GUEST on the boot floppy, you can run it right after the boot-up, without changing diskettes.
3) The hard drive on my 9-month old Dell Inspiron 2650 laptop failed. Dell replaced it quite quickly, but I had to reload everything onto the machine, which was tedious. I used this opportunity to set the machine up to multi-boot several OS's, including DOS 6.2 and Win XP Pro, the OS that came on the laptop. To my surprise, the non-M$, custom WinXP reinstall disk that Dell provided was able to do a clean install after the other OS partitions were hidden from it. (Remember that I already owned a licensed copy of DOS 6.2 .)
Because I had good experiences in the past with System Commander (a multi-boot utility), I bought the same company's Partition Commander (US$49), which includes a basic version of an updated System Commander that supports WinXP. This has been a very satisfactory way to run DOS/O-O-L and Win XP on the same machine. In WinXP, *all* the partitions are visible-FAT16, FAT32, and NTFS. In DOS, only the FAT partition is visible.
I should note that I have not yet been able to get Win 98SE to run properly on this laptop. After searching dozens of messages on many boards, I've never found anyone with an Intel 845MZ chipset who got Win98 to run on their laptop. In general, no one should buy a *laptop* with the intention of installing an OS that it hasn't run successfully unless the seller will warrant that the OS can be installed! I mention this because running O-O-L is a tricky task, and you want to make sure you'll be able to install both the OS you're using, and to install O-O-L sucessfully, before you spend money on a new machine.
4) I was issued an old but sound (circa 1998) Gateway OBS E3200 - 300 (Pentium II 298 MHz) PC at work, with Windows XP installed by our IT department. Althought it was a risky thing to do (I mean on a nicely-working machine that was set up by someone else), I bought Norton Partition Magic 8.0 (Also US$49 -- but one week later, it was "Free with Rebate" at COMPUSA. But there's no price guarantee for rebates ... ) It's a well-written program, if not easy-to-use. But I succeeded in setting up the machine to triple boot, one partition each for DOS, Windows 98SE, and Windows XP. It worked like a charm. One of the keys to success is to not install Boot Magic (The Norton counterpart to System Commander, included with Partition Magic) until you have the three partitions built and the three OS's installed. You do this by "hiding" the other two partitions while you install DOS and Win98. (The already complete XP installation was moved into the "last" and largest partition by Partition Magic.) No question, this is a risky procedure, and "your results may vary!"
While I cannot guarantee that these are the right choices for you, in the above installation, I used Partition Magic to organize three partitions on my 40 Gig hard drive. In order from the start of the drive (RTFM - this is important!) they are FAT-16 250 Meg (DOS), FAT-32 500 Meg (Win 98SE), NTFS 36.5 Gig (Win XP). In fact, the first step was to "move" the start of the Win XP partition forward on the hard drive, creating the space at the beginning for the two new partitions.
5) There are several utilities that are designed to either run DOS on non-DOS machines, or provide access to NTFS hard drives for DOS programs. Several users have mentioned success with "Virtual DOS" programs (including on Apple machines, where it's the *only* way). I have no experience to report myself, and some of them are NOT free. This route becomes more important as newer machines (like my laptop) have new chipsets and BIOS options that are not so compatible with legacy DOS code.
On one of those XP machines with an NTFS-formatted hard drive, I found that the free (read-only) version of NTFSDOS works very well. In fact, you can start O-O-L 2.4.2 on my NTFS laptop that way, and run it just fine. But when you exit normally, and it can't write the shutdown files, it crashes to a reboot. I presume the same thing would happen if you tried to print from O-O-L. (I'm not complaining, just reporting.)
If you have anything to contribute to this document, please email me so I can include it.
This document includes material developed by:
Web References:
Tim Buchman pages:
Free Obsession© Utilities at
[Footnote 1]
I believe that extensive BIOS shadowing (which is not exposed in the BIOS Setup screens!) makes it impossible to successfully install a page frame for EMM386, for use by OOL versions before 4.x. However, I accidentally discovered that 2.x, 3.x, and 4.x will all run on my Dell Inspiron 2650 laptop without HIMEM.SYS or EMM386.EXE, when running from a DOS-boot floppy diskette (DOS 5,6, Win95, Win98). (Note that 4.2 has never required EMM386.) This is quite astonishing to me.
Interestingly, OOL 2.4.2 will not run in this situation when booting from the WinXP DOS-boot diskette, as it does quite well with older DOS version boot-diskettes.
This is a listing of part of an Obsession 2.4 Console boot-up OS screens. It's the initialization of EMM386:
MICROSOFT Expanded Memory Manager 386 Version 4.33.06X (C) Copyright Microsoft Corporation 1986, 1990 EMM386 successfully installed. Available expanded memory . . . . . . . . 6960 KB LIM/EMS version . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.0 Total Available expanded memory . . . . . . . . 6960 KB LIM/EMS version . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.0 Total expanded memory pages . . . . . . . 459 Available expanded memory pages . . . . . 435 Total handles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 Active handles . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Page frame segment . . . . . . . . . . . D000 H Total upper memory available . . . . . . 31 KB Largest Upper Memory Block available . . 31 KB Upper memory starting address . . . . . . C800 H EMM386 Active.
If your PCs BIOS Setup pages don't mention memory paging, you may have difficulty running the older versions of Obsession Off-Line.
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