I've got a lot of questions about DOS and older computers, most of them out of curiosity. Ok, first of all, 1.Were the first 386 CPUs (386SX) 16 bit like the 286s, or are all 386s 32 bit? 2.Is it true that an 8088 CPU can run Windows 3, even without a HD? 3.What's the bare minimum of a CPU needed to decode MP3s @ at least 128KBPS, and is a math coprocessor needed? Could a 286 do it? 4.Is it possible to run CP/M programs or the CP/M operating system itself on a modern pentium 4 PC using an emulator? (much like the DOS emulator) 5.Could I connect my old 8088 or 286 PCs to high speed internet using a text based browser? The 8088 runs DOS 2.x from 5 inch floppies, (has no hard drive) and the 286 has DOS 6.22+win 3.11 from it's hard drive. Lastly, I'm having problems running my DOS games on win XP. I can get the games to install, but whenever I try opening them, it says that I don't have enough memory to run them! WHAT? I don't know if it means RAM or actual hard drive space, but I've got plenty of storage in both ways, (160 GB hard drive and 1 GB of DDR RAM) I thought XP could handle DOS better than Win 9x, yet I could run DOS flawlessly on the Win 95 machine I once had. Somebody told me that it was because my 2.8 GHZ P4's 533 MHz bus is to fast for DOS, and the speed of the DDR RAM is to fast for DOS to recognize. Is this true? Up till now, I thought there was no such thing as being to fast! Thanks for reading my (long) post!

I can not answer a lot of your questions but have a read through the following sites: http://www.powerload.fsnet.co.uk http://www.dossolutions.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/home.htm http://home.pmt.org/~drose/aw.html http://www.bgdf.com/darkehorse http://pages.prodigy.net/pcfreak/pcfwebzone/indexmus.htm http://www.mwpms.uklinux.net do a "google" search as well..... Better than counting sheep at bedtime!!!

SPECIFICALLY CP/M http://www.seasip.demon.co.uk/Cpm DOS games If will not run and they have an installation to hard drive 'setup' or 'exe' file make that Win95 compatible before installation. Try running the games in W95 compatibility, also some games need Sound Card at IRQ5 DMA 0,1,3,5 and 22h, but I have had about 50/50 success. If all this fails, in XP make an MSDOS8 boot disk and try launching the game of boot disk. ADSL Broadband External non-OS specific Modem which connects to NIC in PC via RJ45 cable, need Packet Driver only installed when using with Arachne and Minuet (I have not used Lynx etc etc). You have to configure the Modems web page from the web browser, but waiting for someone to tell me it works.

Thanks for replying! I'll try it out.