Mick P -

I didn't find anything at the Sourceforge pages to indicate for sure whether DosBox can read NTFS format drives. (Quite a few DOS emulators that I've seen require a FAT or FAT32 formatted partition.) It looks like DosBox probably can read NTFS, but can that be confirmed?

With a new Vista installation, it's not likely that Joe has anything except NTFS, unless he's got an aux/external drive tacked on somewhere.

From what I've found, the "Beep" command (beep.sys) that most likely was used for the original playback effectively disappeared during (or before?)the ancient Win95/Win98 era. It's been gone long enough that WinXP Help [Help | Index | "commands" | Help With DOS Commands] doesn't even list its absence as a change. Win98 appears to have just played a .wav file for the boot beeps, although I don't find much on how it managed to play it before the sound card gets turned on to get the boot beeps. WinXP appears to turn sound off until audio drivers are available, and plays beeps¹ only if there are errors.

¹ Possibly by playback from the 80h "error card" bootlog function, later in the boot sequence?

I'd think that understanding what's simple to do would require some familiarity with the innards of SongWright, but of course one doesn't really need deep understanding if something that works can be found.

John