I still have it on floppy somewhere. I have three DOS machines, a 386 20mhz, 486SX 25mhz, and a 486 DX2 66mhz. I keep them because I am sentimental and every once in a while I like to play games that I can't get to play on anything else (i.e. Wing Commander: Privateer), usually on the DX2 which has a whopping 32 megabytes of RAM. :DL

I still love DOS, but you know what they say, your first love brings the fondest memories. :03:

Do they ever :yep: I love DOS also. I still have one of the first models of PC ever made - the IBM PC/XT 4.77 MHz / 9Mhz Turbo (nice 4 color screen)! Have some TRS-80 Model III's also :o

The reason I love DOS is because it doesn't impede me from accessing the hardware unlike Windows. Protected mode is nice but when you want to access the hardware directly Windows is a royal PITA to do it with :shifty:

I desided to make a test using the latest of all programs. Latest winzip (v16), latest Winrar (v4.11) and latest 7zip (v9.20)

I compressed a full game of almost 400 MB of mixed data, video, pictures, music files. Here is the result:

7zip: 130 seconds and compressed size became 367,677 kB
WinRAR: 116 seconds and compressed size became 368,461 kB
Winzip: 79 seconds and compressed size became 365,153 kB

All programs used the best compression available.

The latest winzip beat the crap out of 7zip and winrar in terms of time and it is also smaller.

WinRar beat 7zip in terms of speed by a relatively good margin and had just a little bit extra size, nothing that will matter.

7zip had the longest compression time.

7zip compressed 2,896,160 bytes of data per second
WinRar compressed 3,252,614 bytes of data per second
Winzip compressed 4,733,117 bytes of data per second

:know:

winzip spent about 40% less time versus 7zip. If you compress 10 GB of data using 7zip and we imagine it will take an hour to do so, then winzip will spend 36 minutes to do the same, thats how serious it becomes when dealing with huge amounts of data.

I'm not disputing your results but I find 7zip fulfilled my needs over the others when I first started unzipping( I don't zip), brand loyalty and the fact it still does want I want means it still has a place on any PC I have.

The only problem is that you can't predict time and final size, it just can't be done without very complex math. It will always vary, sometimes there will be great fluctuations.

I dumped Winzip because of the files it wouldn't open. If they've improved it (and I'm sure they have) since then, more power to them.

An IBM PC/XT and a TRS-80 Model III, those are Jurassic. I remember playing some good games on a TRS-80 Color at the Radioshack next to the store that I worked in the 80's. Good stuff.

Yeah, protected mode caused me a number of problems when I tried to run DOS apps and games in Windows 3.1, ,95, and 98. Surprisingly, Windows XP has a pretty good DOS emulator built in and I have a few of my old favorites running nicely on it.

Ever heard of DOSBOX? Google it. Works wonders for running 16bit and DOS apps in protected mode (aka Windows)

7zip is free and has no nag screens, Winzip and WinRar are not. 7zip will open nearly everything, including Linux .debs and other package files. I have also read that 7zip also has a safer compression algorithm.

Who makes mods of 10 GB in size. For the size of mods we are dealing with, size and time do not matter.

I've known about DOSBOX for a long time. I have tried it and, personally, I think it is junk. Too much configuration and the games run worse than with the emulator in Win XP. So far I have had the original Master of Orion, Silent Hunter, Wing Commander III, and a few more running all quite well, with sound, without using it.