Running Ensemble (or older Geos suites) on very fast PCs with Windows XP or Vista

Back in the old days, Ensemble would run just fine from DOS or Windows 98.  Windows XP and 
PCs faster than a bit over 1GHz caused some problems with Geos due to problems with both XP 
and Ensemble.  The program that loads and starts Ensemble from Windows or DOS doesn’t work 
with most processors faster than 1 GHz and Windows XP has issues with letting older DOS based 
software run in an XP Window.  We’ve been able to work around these problems by using 
programs like CPU Killer to slow down the PC’s CPU while Geos was loading, and by tweaking 
the XP shortcut that started Ensemble.

Even newer and faster processors often won’t respond to CPU Killer and tweaking XP and Vista 
shortcuts don’t do the job.   But don’t despair.  There is a solution!  DOSBox lets you run 
Ensemble and NDO in XP and Vista on even the fastest new processors.  Downloading and setting 
up DOSBox to run Ensemble is pretty straightforward, but there are a couple of tricks to getting 
the best performance from Ensemble.

Download DOSBox at http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/.  Make sure you download the Windows 
installable version – DOSBox is also available for other operating systems like Linux.  The 
DOSBox section of the Sourceforge web site has a series of HowTos, FAQs and Forums that will 
tell you almost all you would ever want to know about DOSBox.  Install DOSBox on your 
Windows XP or Vista PC as you would any other Windows program.  We’ve found that you need 
to make only two tweaks to your Ensemble setup to ensure it runs smoothly in DOSBox.

First, in the geos.ini file in the Ensemble directory, change the file system settings to the 
following:

[system]
;fs = ms4.geo
primaryFSD = ntfat.geo
       fs = {
         ntfat.geo
         cdrom.geo
       }

Second, you should make sure that your Ensemble directory is not at the root of your hard drive.  
A good setup is to create a directory on your C: drive named Geos and place your Ensemble 
directory in the Geos directory.

All that’s left to do is to make some changes to DOSBox’s configuration file and you’re good to 
go.  DOSBox’s configuration file is named dosbox.conf and is in the directory into which you 
installed DOSBox.  Dosbox.conf is similar to the geos.ini file in that you can edit it using any 
text editor (like Windows Notepad).  Lines that start with # are for comments and are not looked
at by DOSBox when it runs.  First, in the [dosbox] section change memsize=16 to memsize=64.  Next, 
in the [cpu] section change cycles=auto to cycles=max.  And finally add your own lines to the 
[autoexec] section to automatically start Ensemble by clicking the DOSBox shortcut.  My 
[autoexec] section looks like this:

[autoexec]
# Lines in this section will be run at startup.
mount c c:\geos
c:
cd ensemble
loader

On one of my PCs, a 1.1GHz machine, Ensemble wouldn’t run with the cycles=max setting.  And 
it ran very slow with the default cycles=auto setting.  I increased the cycles setting to get 
faster performance from Ensemble and ended up with it at cycles=10000.  

One downside to DOSBox is that it does not have parallel printer support.  One popular workaround 
is to print to file using either of Ensemble’s GhostScript printer drivers (color or B/W).  Give 
the file to which you are printing a DOS (8.3) name with the file type after the dot as PS.  Then 
open that file in Windows using GSView (download at http://www.ghostgum.com.au/).  GSView is a 
graphical interface for Ghostscript (and requires you to have Ghostscript installed before it 
will run) which you can download at http://www.ghostscript.com/.  From the GSView window you can 
print your Ensemble output to any printer you have installed or you can convert your Ensemble 
output to a .PDF file.