Dunno. I never tried it. It would be very cool though.

I remember the days typing in wp 5.1 ... different colours for different types of letters 😀

Great fun.

After some experimenting, I finally got the DOS 6.0b version of WordPerfect loading in DOSBox. It may even be more stable than running it directly under Windows ME. (At least when it crashes, it doesn't crash the whole system.) I needed the following command line switches to get it working:
wp /R /NS /DL
Seem to work fine with or without the /R though. /NS turns off sound support which sometimes causes conflicts. /DL prevents the program launcher from running, so it can't launch programs like the fax or grammatic from inside WordPerfect.

I was able to bring up a document, run the spell check and thesaurus and actually get the print preview window working without crashing.

I thought this was pretty exciting. There's still an avid WordPerfect users community out there. Bet some of them would enjoy being able to run DOS WordPerfect on various platforms through DOSBox.

You are right!
Well the disabling of the progam launcher is a good thing. Dosbox it's support for weird ways of starting programing (using an launcher) isn't perfect. I don't see why disabling sound would help. But it's a start.

Before you write a long book in wp in Dosbox...
don't forget that you can't print in Dosbox 😀

..anyway I'll try wp 5.1 myself if I can find it

Qbix wrote:
>I don't see why disabling sound would help.
Was just using the same switches I use under Windows ME. For some reason my sound card interferes with WP running. Just retried some more settings in DOSBox and it seems to work fine with or without the /NS command (not that you really need sound all that much in a word processer). I definitely needed the /DL command though. The /R switch is supposed to make it load faster, that's according to http://wpdos.org

iampiti wrote:
>Before you write a long book in wp in Dosbox...
>don't forget that you can't print in Dosbox
I'd thought about that situation before for Windows ME for working with newer printers that don't have drivers. Am wondering if you could print to a file, perhaps in a postscript format. Then you could use an outside program like Ghostscript to actually send the file to the printer. Ghostcript will work on Windows or Linux/FreeBSD, which is nice. There was also some information on printing using Ghostscript at the site I previously mentioned. Might be worth checking into further just for fun. I have WordPerfect in DOS and Windows, so I can edit in DOS and print in Windows. Sometimes some of the editing features are easier to use in the DOS version, plus the letters on the screen seem clearer to read in DOS full text mode.

Just for fun, I checked out the printing option. I went into the printer settings, edited the printer, selected port and told it to write to a file. There's a 'prompt for file name' option that I selected. Then I tried printing and the text goes straight to a file in the printer's format ready for sending to a printer.

Too bad the copy /b option doesn't appear to work within DOSBox. Then you could attempt to send a binary printer file directly to a printer connected to a parallel port. We used to use copy /b to print plots from a plotting program we created at one place I used to work.

Ok, I unburied Wp 5.1 and tried it on DosBox.

...didn't test much but everything seemed to work properly.
Printing: 😀
Ok, I downloaded a postscript driver from a website and printed to a file....
and YES you got a nice postscript file that you can print and do whatever you like with, so you can even print your work done on wp5.1 😁

🤣, that's fabulous. 😁

L Michaels wrote:

Too bad the copy /b option doesn't appear to work within DOSBox. Then you could attempt to send a binary printer file directly to a printer connected to a parallel port.

You don't have to use /b in dosbox. It seems to treat all files as binaries. However I don't know if a "copy file lpt1:" or something would work...

copy lpt1 will not work.

There is no lpt1 device in dosbox.