Dual boot Windows 10 machine for astro-ware?

[rene-gedaly]

Has anyone made a partition on their native Intel/Windows 10 machine so that they could install a back level OS, say Windows XP or 7, and thereby install old versions of astronomy software?

I'd like to be able to use the MegaStar 5 Help files but solutions I've seen for other back level software have me changing the registry. Not horrible, but I'd rather do a clean dual-boot of two OSes.

Mac or Unix bigots, welcome. I've got an open mind.

Thanks.

[stephen-jones]

I'm not having any trouble running MegaStar in Windows 10. Is there something special about the help files? ( I don't use them)

Sent from my SM-G930P using Tapatalk

[rene-gedaly]

It's all about the Help files. They haven't worked since Windows 7 or before. I love context sensitive help but MegaStar 5 would need to do the same thing Skytools does to allow its help system to run. I just don't see that happening. Maybe John's way of running a virtual machine would be the way to go. Looks so much simpler than the VMs set up back in the day. Or maybe I'll just kick back and read the print book!

Thanks for the reply, Stephen.

[barneyj]

I've had pretty good results just installing the old winhlp32.exe from XP on Windows 10 to open hlp files from old programs.

Another is to convert the hlp files to pdf using one of the online converters.