Vista Doesn't Mean the End of APBA Hockey

Last Updated on Friday, 23 November 2007 17:25 Written by Brian Senecal Friday, 09 November 2007 19:48

Unfortunately, APBA Hockey will no longer run under Windows Vista. However, all is not lost. There are plenty of DOS-Emulators out there that will run APBA Hockey under Windows Vista. I’ve even found it useful to run them on XP in order to slow the game down to a readable pace. In this article I’ll walk you through installing and running DOSBox under Vista.

First we need to go get DOSBox. You can download it from the SourceForge site(http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/download.php?main=1). Just select the version for Windows from the download page(figure 1. Once downloaded, simply run the install and select all the default options.)

Figure 1-Download DOSBox

Figure 1

Next, we’ll need to open up “My Computer” and navigate to the install directory. If you selected the default options it will be under “C:\Program Files\DOSBox-0.72.” There you will find a file “dosbox.conf” (figure 2). Open it using Notepad. There is a lot you can do with this file, but for today we are going to focus on two sections.

Figure 2-DOSBox.conf

Figure 2

First is the section titled [cpu]. It’s just a short way down. In that section is an entry “cycles=auto”. This entry will set the number of instructions that DOSBox tries to emulate each millisecond. I’ve found when zipping games, 30000 gives me a good speed. If you are playing games, you will want to set this lower in order to be able to read the play-byplay. Experiment by changing auto to a number. For now, let’s assume we are going for zipping speed so “cycles=auto” will become “cycles=30000.”

Figure 3- Set the cycles

Figure 3

Next is the section [autoexec]. This section gives commands we want run, when DOSBox is run. We need to mount the drive that we have APBA Hockey installed on. I install mine on my D drive. The command we will use is called mount. This will “mount” a DOS drive in DOSBox. The syntax for the command is “mount <newdriveletter> <path to be mounted>” So to mount my D drive we will simply enter on a single line under this section “mount d d:\”. I like to have APBA Hockey run automatically when I open DOSBox as that is all I use it for. So we will add a few more liunes under our mount command:

[autoexec]

# Lines in this section will be run at startup.

Mount d d:\

cd apba

cd hockey

hockey

You can actually cut and paste this right into your dosbox.conf file if you have APBA installed on your d drive. IF you installed APBA on another drive, simply change the “d” to your drive letter in the mount command and the following line.

So even with an upgrade to Vista, your APBA days are far from over! If you have any questions, feel free to email me at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Vista Doesn't Mean the End of APBA Hockey

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