Unraveling the Mysteries of MSI Compatibility Modes in Windows 7

re: Unraveling the Mysteries of MSI Compatibility Modes in Windows 7

Vijay — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 07:27:12 GMT

Nice Post Chris. It does help us in visualizing the significance of an MSI based engineering.

Cheers'

Vijay

MS-MVP [Setup-Deploy]

re: Unraveling the Mysteries of MSI Compatibility Modes in Windows 7

TD Williams — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 18:44:29 GMT

Nice exercise Chris, thanks for the tip!

re: Unraveling the Mysteries of MSI Compatibility Modes in Windows 7

Ganesh — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 10:44:13 GMT

Hi Chris , I was trying to play around with compat modes and downloaded a 16 bit game Chaos Overloads to test it out.

This installation is not an msi but an exe . During installation it performs explicit check to see if the O.S is Win 95.

I had tried to set the compatiblity mode to Windows 95 however that did not work .

Can you suggest a tool like orca or any workaround with which I could by pass the Win 95 version check?

re: Unraveling the Mysteries of MSI Compatibility Modes in Windows 7

Chris Jackson — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 21:29:28 GMT

@Ganesh - 32-bit shims aren't going to do anything for a 16-bit exe, since you can't host a 32-bit shim DLL in a 16-bit process. Orca isn't helpful either, since it's an MSI database editor and you don't have an MSI database. Unfortunately, we have never had a need to lie about being Windows 95 (a 32-bit OS) to a 16-bit application. The version lie we have for 16-bit applications is WOWCFEX_WIN31VERSIONLIE, since Windows 3.1 was the last 16-bit OS we shipped. If that doesn't work, then unfortunately you'll have to look for another solution outside of shims.

re: Unraveling the Mysteries of MSI Compatibility Modes in Windows 7

Malcolm McCaffery — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 01:18:36 GMT

I've got Windows 3.1 applications working great on Windows 7 x64 - I used DosBOX (http://www.dosbox.com/) to run Windows 3.1. Works great - however DosBOX has no facility to install drivers (although it includes inbuilt sound & mouse drivers)