Screw you XP, I've finally found the solution after a whole god damn night of looking.
The solution I found was Winuae (the amiga emulator), an Amiga Kickstart Rom and a nice downloadable copy of UFO : Enemy Unknown for the Amiga. Ha! Up yours XP, I have beaten you and am now going to play to my hearts content, I might have to do a damn lot of simulated disk swapping, but I still get to play it!
That's one in the eye of Billy Boy and his annoying software

*sigh* Did he just say downloadable? I think he did.....

Well, Your Honor, he obviously does own a copy of XCOM for DOS*, and he didn't actually link to the site he downloaded from. If his original copy was a valid purchase, he might get off with 40 hours community service. (X-Com community, that is.)

*that he couldn't get working under XP. See other thread, and the FAQ forum. It's a common complaint. Personally I never touch the stuff.

I may have bended the rules of the law slightly, but come on! It's UFO, being without it can make you seriously ill and stressed and cause depression! I have an Amiga so the Kickstart rom is legal for me, and though it may not be the same format I do own a copy of the game and I bloody well want to play it, if that means downloading then so be it.

As for 40 hours X-Com community service, I have no objections if it means I get to shoot things with heavy plasma

If you have the original copy of both, then no laws are broken and I shall, in no way, frown upon it. So don't worry The Dead, I won't be stopping by to bust you for that anytime soon.

True, if you have paid for a copy of the game, even the Queen won't complain.

I have the PC copy but not the Amiga, but if the people who own the copyright want to moan about it I'll just blame it all on Bill Gates, it's all his fault, every last bit of it.

Well, I'd not say so (he-he, I'm actually not a defender of BG and his creation). But, DOS is so archaic now that it seems natural they stopped supporting it in full. Besides, there were no true support of DOS even in NT and XP (as well as 2000) is based on NT.

Thank god there's Linux.

Now if only I wasn't so lazy, as to not to go out and buy it...

"They said run under Windows 95 or better. So I ran in on Linux."

But seriuosly folks, I trried converting some of my QB code to run under XP, and you can see why we all have so many problems getting UFO to run. The Dos emulation sucks.

There really is no excuse for it. Ok, well there is, money. MONEY GRABBING BA-

PEOPLE!

The point being, the demand for decent dos is there, but microsoft don't sell dos apps so they don't care.

* sighs *

THEY DON'T CARE!

But anyway, it also sucks that you can't run certain windows apps under the later OSs either. Anyone know how to get Heroes of Might and Magic III to go under XP?

DOS the kernel, is indeed pushing up daisies. But DOS the command prompt lives! In XP it's hobbling with tons of new features hammered in and lots of goodies ripped out, but it's still alive and kicking I tell you.

Just had my first experience of XP (a real mixed bag of goodness and badness, I must say), and the first thing I did was kick around in the command prompt. Why oh why did they flip the directory columns? Good thing my years of exposure to the horror that is the command prompt allowed me to figure out how to undo that.

And goodness gracious, there in the root directory, the vestigial autoexec.bat and config.sys files! I thought NT based systems did away with them?

Hmm... I wonder if progman.exe still exists (win 3.1's gooey) ? It still does in Win98.

*poke*
*poke*

It's not bad, but it's also full of flaws (why the heck is the computer's off switch software controlled? I had to reset my computer by switching it off at the power mains when the computer completely locked up! Don't even ask me about using the reset button. There isn't one. No, the computer's not meant to be shut of. I tell it to shut down and forget to switch off the capslock key, and the light remains shining even though it's supposedly shut down. Again, the answer was simple. Switch it off completely at the power mains.)

Apocalypse runs fine, but the cityscape executable won't start. So it doesn't work. (and for all I could know, it would probably be a very easy fix)

UFO CE's running fine, but DirectX is trying to force a 320x200 screen into 640x480... I wouldn't mind, but the pixels aren't doing any 'line breaks' once they hit 320 pixels, if you know what I mean. So I'm going to need the f0dder patch.

Hmm, I saw a 'for dummies' book with a full copy of Red Hat Linux. I wonder....

Ah, I could sit here, turn a blind eye to what little is good in XP, and complain all day (since it's easy to complain). But that won't be productive.

I apologise for my rambling.

- NKF

i find it strange that i am quite conservative on OS's for comps (in terms of usage, not argumentative), and other stuff, but i quite freely accept other new stuff. liek the biggest example here would be windows 98vs NT etc, and for me media player2vs newer ones, cuz the newer ones load ages. on my comp anyway. im sure they have better bells and whistles, but some how i like medea player 2. well, thats me for ya.

All my complaints about XP have now stopped, it now seems to work perfectly with everything, including games that insist that they won't work on windows XP