I hope this is the right place to put this, since it is, fundamentaly, a Win98 machine.

My basic question is: I'm trying to understand the differences between these three different ways to get to a DOS prompt:
(Relative to what drivers and so forth, might be loaded.)

1. Boot to the command prompt at the boot-up menu. (Which one sees by having BootMenu=1 in the Msdos.sys file.)

2. Boot all the way into Windows, then open a full-screen DOS box.

3. Boot all the way into Windows, then Restart in MS_DOS Mode.

I believe, that 1 and 3 are the same, but not sure. I know that a dosstart.bat file is involved with one way. And I'm not sure how the config.sys, autoexec.bat, and dosstart.bat all interact with each other.

Any help that anyone can offer in clarifying all that, would be appreciated.

And, in case it helps, here's what I'm trying to do:

Ultimately, I'm trying to get an older Aureal Vortex 2500 (8830 chipset) PCI souncard to work with the DOS-based MP3 player called MpxPlay. This is on an older 233Mhz MMX computer that has slide-in drive bays, so I can quickly switch back and forth between pure DOS 6.22 and Win98SE.

Depending on the answer to this thread, I may start a new one in the Multimedia section.

Thanks all.

Dex