Joe -

I don't recall how the DOS version played the music, but I thought it was from midi files(?).

With the startup (shortcut) you used, the DOS program should be running in a "Command" window, or at least in Command mode, which isn't quite old-fashioned DOS but should be close enough. If the setup for "sounds and audio" in Control Panel (or whatever Vista calls it) includes a "DOSSY" input to your sound card, you should get the noises.

Barring you're finding a way to do that, when I put "DOS MIDI" into Google, I got a number of "DOS MIDI PLAYERS," one of which you might be able to load, and then make it the "player" for files of the type the music is written in (hopefully .mid?).

Having not seen Vista, I can't be sure it's the same; but the "preferred" way of running a DOS program in WinXP would be to click "Start" and "Run" which will give you a little box where you can type "Command" (no quotes) which will open¹ a "DOS Window" where you can go to the folder that has the folksong.bat file and then just type "folksong" and it should run the .bat.

¹You can also get the "Command Prompt" = DOS Window at Start|Programs|Accessories and click "Command Prompt."

Either way, in the Command window, you'll be running in the closest you can get to "being a DOS computer."

The place where DOS programs break down is that many of them try to talk directly to hardware, and neither WinXP nor Vista allows that. Everything has to go through the "hardware abstraction layer" and get translated. Vista has made claims of being even better at handling DOS hardware calls than WinXP but I've seen no real proof of that.

John