Re: comcom.com

[Jochen Reinwand <jbr.1@gmx.net>]

Hello,

On Friday 17 January 2003 19:47, Stas Sergeev wrote:
> >  Is that really true? Has the interest in a DOS emulation dropped so
> >  much?
>
> At least for dosemu it is true.
> Most developers are gone, as well
> as the most distributors.
> My personal opinion is that this
> is more because dosemu always failed
> to achieve the necessary level of
> stability and security in order the
> users and distributors to trust it
> any longer after it crossed the 1.0
> boundary.

And in our days the interests in running old DOS software has also dropped 
dramatically. When dosemu started there was much interest in running DOS 
software to make Linux more powerful. But now...

> Now we are finally approaching that,

Really fascinating the amount of improvements made over the last few months!

> but I think the loses were fatal.

What a pity that I don't have the time nor the abilities to contribute to the 
development :(

> But at least I know two distributors
> who decided to give it a chance once
> again, packaging 1.1.4+.

Sounds great!

> > Btw: I came across an interesting project a few days ago. It is called
> > dosbox
> > (http://dosbox.zophar.net/) and it seems to be a DOS emulator for Linux
> > _and_ Windows. It seems like there is done a lot of work for it.
>
> It is intended to run games and only
> games. This is official. Dosemu is
> intended to do *much* more, actually
> the games were never (until recently)
> the main goal of dosemu, so that
> projects cannot be compared.

I believe that what I said above about DOS software does not apply to games! I 
have a lot of old DOS games I'd really like to play "forever". With every new 
computer I got the number old games running on it, even under plain DOS, got 
smaller. The next 64 bit generation will make things even worse...

> > Why have they started a new project? DOSemu is much better at the
> > moment. So why spending time for implementing things already done?
>
> There were reasons:
> 1. Dosemu isn't portable (very bad).
> 2. Dosemu was *dead* (not any more)
> 3. Dosemu didn't have a sound support,
> so it was useless for games (not any
> longer, the sound support is much better
> than anywhere else now, except probably
> the bochs, but the bochs have so many
> developers...)

And they have a really SLOW emulator. On the other hand processors won't 
become slower over the next few years...
The only remaining problem about bochs is the difficult usage. This special 
container files for harddrives are definitively not as comfortable as the 
dosemu way of simply using directory! Always wanted my DOS data on a drive 
with journaling and support for symlinks :-)

> 4. I don't think DOSbox is intended
> to compete with dosemu at all.
> I think most users of DOSbox are the
> WinNT/2000 users. That people always
> suffered a horrible DOS support.
> Now I think WinXP have somewhat better
> DOS support (including sound, VESA and
> DPMI, but I may be misleaded as I am
> not a Windows user).

It's a bit better.
A wanted to play a quick Duke 3D network game with my notebook. The only 
available OSs on it are XP and Linux. I wasn't able to run Duke with network 
support under XP, so I tried dosemu. I was not able to get network running 
with dosemu either (have not tried hard enough, of course), but I got 
interested in the "new" dosemu capable of running Duke with sound. Thanx for 
your patches!
I compared dosemu to WinXP DOS support with a few games. They are nearly 
equally capable of running the games! dosemu was a little bit better ;-)

Keep on the good work!

regards
Jochen