Paul wrote, in response to my statement that I had fractint working on my phone:
At what resolutions ??
I'm sorry it took so long to respond, as I said elsewhere, I have way to many fun projects going at once :-) The native resolution of the Samsung Galaxy S3 is 1280x730, but that doesn't seem to deter DosBox. At the moment I have not tried to edit fractint.cfg to allow special resolutions, but the 1280x1024 works great, and fills the top half of the screen in portrait mode, leaving room for the virtual keyboard. Clearly DosBox is doing some video emulation magic since 1280x1024 exceeds the native resolution. Earlier I said fractint under dosbox was barely usable, but since then I have learned a few things. My first experiment was with the free android app called aDosbox. Today I reached deep in my wallet for $3.49 and bought Dosbox Turbo, which is much better and worth every penny. As a general rule the "svn" versions of DosBox are better because of all the extra features. The DosBox Turbo author has done a very good job. The other problem is the keyboard. Most Android keyboards don't support the function keys/page up/del etc, that Fractint needs. So I installed something called the "Hacker's keyboard" (free). You have to set it for showing five rows, not four, in order to see the special keys. This works great, and not only that, DosBox Turbo emulates the mouse with the touch screen! All of the above took me 45 minutes, and now Fractint is at least reasonably usable. Apparently I can attach a full-size (or small) bluetooth keyboard/mouse to a Samsung Galaxy S3, I am tempted to try :-)
For no good reason I upgraded my Windows 7 machine to Windows 8 while the price was cheap, and not surprisingly Fractint also runs fine on that platform in DosBox.
Same question as above...
You can run vesainfo under DosBox. The standard DosBox reports a maximum of 1280x1024x256, but the svn version of DosBox supports 1600x1200. So by modifying fractint.cfg 1600x1200x256 works fine with Fractint. Resolution is more a DosBox issue than an OS issue, so I would think that applies to most any OS. I haven't checked to see if more video modes have been added to DosBox since I downloaded it a few months ago.
(And I do not really care for what Microsoft has done with Win-8. Too many Options and Preferences can no longer be modified without going directly into the Registry, or they are gone for good.)
This is off topic, and I don't want to start a big Windows 8 discussion, but I'll say this much, which doesn't really answer your observation, it's just a report of my experience. I bought three licenses of Windows 8 before the price went up including my HDTV and my wife's laptop. I did this not because there was any obvious advantage but because I'm a geek :-), and besides, I made good backups so I could go back if needed. I was pleasantly suprised that everything works so well. I didn't miss the start menu at all, in fact the new "search" method of finding things is vastly superior to the start menu (I have way too many icons on my desktop, and if I forget where something is, it takes me a while to find it.). My partner Susan, who's smart enough but no geek, had zero trouble adapting. For most purposes Windows 8 is Windows 7 with some extra stuff. I can't comment about your registery observations because I don't know. All I can say is virtually all my software works great, as long as I have current versions. Now that the cheap price is gone, though, there is NO way it makes any sense to upgrade a Windows 7 machine to Windows 8. Tim