2K and XP are based on NT, which do not involve DOS in their operation at all. These systems use the NTVDM, a very restricted virtualization environment for running DOS programs. XP is a bit heavier than 2K, but they actually heavily improved DOS support because it was targeted to people moving from Windows versions that booted themselves from DOS. The VDM used in 95/98/ME is significantly less restricted than the NTVDM and has much more access to hardware (fun fact: technically, it doesn't depend on the system being booted from DOS, it is virtualized since Windows kicks DOS out during the boot process... but Windows 9X also spends a bunch of time pretending it's still DOS with 32-bit code instead of old 16-bit DOS code, and running DOS programs are allowed by Windows to access hardware directly for the most part). Basically, if you want to run DOS games and Windows stuff, run 95 if you can (MUCH lighter than 98, lol at driver support though), 98 if you can't (98SE adds a bunch of shit like USB and a bunch of other drivers). That being said, if you're running old Windows programs only, even 16-bit Windows programs, use 2000. It is faster than XP. Fun shit too -- 95, 98, and ME can't run programs for Windows before 3.0. There aren't many Windows 1/2 programs, but they exist. ALL 32-bit x86 Windows NT releases, including 32-bit Windows 10, can run Windows 1 and 2 programs. also, I think the quote pushed the line length too long so I got rid of it Reference: 2024/06/07(Fri) 07:01:24