so i have been researching and experimenting for a while to try and find a way of running the win98se kernel and VMM stripped of useless things like the GUI. now i dont mean just replacing the shell to command.com. i want a win32 multitsking DOS OS to play my old games on. one without any of the GUI components loaded to memory. one without dos "boxes". one with fully 32 bit win32 driver, DPMI, and protected mode addressing support and no graphical interface. the problem is that documentaion on the boot process has holes. you can sever GDI and USER from startup or control the loading of drivers or even figure out what is responcible for it or when exactly it happens. is it called from win.com or kernel32 or the vmm32? does anyone know any more about this process?

I remember that if you press F8 before starting windows and then choose selective startup, you can set windows to load everything but what you want. The last question it asks is if you want to load the GUI.

Ok dude got ur point but i'm not sure it is possible to do what you want.
Better try Windows 3.1 for this
Easy:
1) Cut everything and set shell to command.com
2) make winstart.bat in windows dir and add command.com to it. I've noticed before that winstart.bat is loaded after shell and main kernel32, but i'm not sure about win32 apps and of course no multitasking there.
Advanced:
- how Windows loads:
- win.com starts vmm32.vxd
- vmm32.vxd contains vmm.vxd, which is started first (virtual machine manager)
- protected mode starts
- drivers are loading
- shell.vxd from vmm32.vxd starts krnl386.exe
- gdi&user are loaded
- vwin32.vxd from vmm32.vxd starts kernel32.dll
- 32-bit gdi&user are loaded
- gui appears
So... Only possible solution i see is to write vxd driver which will provide dos and multitasking.

depending on what form of windows you use, it is possible. i even seen this done on a winme bootdisk. it's one of the 'miniwin' distros does this.

the idea is to replace one of the files with command.com. something like vmm.vxd or something. you still need a fair few files to do this, but it can be done.

reccomended reading on the subject, including how to do it, is found in 'undocumented dos' [i think]. it talks at length on how to defang windows 9x.

w

addit:

for windows 3.1, you replace the device driver [krnl386.exe], with a suitably renamed command.com. That is, you rename krnl386.exe to krnl386.win, and the copy whatever you want to run as krnl386.exe (including command.com, or 4dos.com).

WinStart.bat



another way of effecting this, is to create a 'winstart.bat' under win3.1, and run things from there, especially if this batch contains the single line 'command.com'.

this will continue to load windows after the game is done, but you will have a 32-bit dos environment to play with.

thanks for the informative responces... i will continue trying. i would love to in the end have something that allowed me to get a dos prompt and use the start command to create new instances of command.com. i dont think at that point anything that understands alt-tab would be loaded so i am not sure where i would go from there. but there must be some way to invoke such action from w32 console applications.