On Tue, 27 Dec 2005 12:52:54 -0800, easytoremember123 wrote:

Because it's a DOS game, and XP is not very compatible with "DOS".

Another reason would be that XP just pretty much sucks.

I doubt it; Doom demos are simply stored sequences of mouse movements
and keypresses, so the smallest change in a map or the executable itself
may cause a demo to desync. And since ZDoom and JDoom are nearly
complete rewrites of the Doom engine (and both AFAIK use different demo
formats) it isn't possible to run old demos with them.

Now this might be possible, I even seem to remember reading of a program
that can do this. Does anyone else here remember it, or was I hallucinating?

doom2.exe is trying to access your Sound Blaster card's hardware
directly, and XP doesn't like that (neither will 2000 or NT). Especially
if you don't have a Sound Blaster-compatible card...

Fortunately, both of your problems can be solved by using prboom
(http://prboom.sf.net/), which not only runs fine in XP but also
provides compatibility modes for playing back of old demos.

If you want to run the original Doom executable on WinXP, you should try
DOSBox.
This emulates DOS environment. It's somewhat slow, but will work well on a
reasonable system.

http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/news.php?show_news=1

An avi movie is something completely different than a game demo. But there
are tools which capture frames from
any window and write them directly to a movie file (like avi).

So the most likely setting would be to run Doom in a DOSBox window and use
such a frame capture tool.
Or use the PRBoom/GLBoom port, which also can play original Doom 1.9 demos.

Converting these Demos to ZDoom format .... no.
I don't think anyone ever created a utility for that.