Re: comcom.com

[Stas Sergeev <stssppnn@yahoo.com>]

Hello.

Jochen Reinwand wrote:
>  I think it would be too miserable since there are so few people 
>  working on
>  > dosemu nowadays :(
>  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.
Now we are finally approaching that,
but I think the loses were fatal.
But at least I know two distributors
who decided to give it a chance once
again, packaging 1.1.4+.

> 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.

> Does anybody know more about it?
Yes. At least people here:
http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=174313
should know much more about it.

> 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...)
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). Let's see what
DOSbox can offer in exchange.
As for linux, dosemu is unbeatable
here, that's for sure (IMHO), but
with such a few developers this can
be eventually changed.