Re: What to expect in dosemu-1.2?

[Stas Sergeev <stsp@aknet.ru>]

Hello.

Samium Gromoff wrote:
> I bet some people are wishing to know what new and cool 
> features the upcoming yet-to-stabilise dosemu-1.2 is 
> going to provide.
Yes, but the best way to find that out,
is simply to get the latest version and
give it a try:)

> I think it`d be cool if someone will come up summarizing 
> both the major user-visible changes
OK, the short list of the top-most user-visible
changes would look like this:

- *Real* DPMI support [havy surgery of an old code]

- Unicode support (no more problems with international
keyboard layouts, no problems when DOS uses different
charset than the one of a Linux etc) [complete rewrite
of the entire subsystem]

- *Real* Sound dupport, up to SB16 [almost a complete
rewrite of DSP code, major rework of DMA code, major
update of midid]. That code still lacks Adlib emulation.

- Many improvements for an X code (full-screen, loadable
fonts, instremu understands more instructions etc)

- Client-server approach for port I/O, which allows
dosemu to drop root at startup and makes it secure
even when running suid-root.

- *Real* joystick support [almost a complete rewrite
of an entire subsystem, as far as I can tell]

- Many improvements to a networking code.

- Many stuff that I forgot to mention

- Unlimited amount of a bug-fixes and a limited
amount of a bug-insertions:)

What does the *Real* stand for? Well, 1.0.x claim
to also support that, and indeed, but not that it
works for anything real there:)


> and the bleeding edge infrastructural stuff.
That is practically not possible to summarize.
Take it as almost every subsystem got a reasonable
amount of an attention, many of the long-standing
problems are magically resolved (magically -
considering the amount of developers involved),
thousands lines of problematic/questionable code
is rewritten etc. ChangeLog can give you a wider
view on that.
All that said, there are still a lot of problems
to resolve and there are certainly things that
used to work before but not any longer (CPU-emu,
for example, is now practically useless, while in
1.0 is was rather strong).

> Besides it`s interesting to know how the dosemu and
> dosbox projects interrelate, and whether you share any
> common codebase?
Not at all. dosemu shares neither the code nor
the ideas with dosbox (probably only a couple of
lines stolen from VDMSound, but only a couple of
lines).
DosBox, being highly portable, has a larger
audience as of now. Dosemu have to catch-up
at that point.