Re: Resurrect DOSEMU

[Frederic Herman <fherman@inferential.com>]

I am hoping that whatever is decided, that the result is an emulator 
that works properly in a 64 bit, particularly AMD, environment.  I have 
an old reliable accounting package which I rely on, that crashes with op 
code errors under the 64 bit environment.

I have given up sometime ago with running it under x86_64,and have 
resorted to using another machine with 32 bit hardware and OS just so I 
can run the accounting package via a remote ssh session.  I have been 
using Fedora Linus, but recently tried a Ubuntu linux (64 bit) and have 
the same problem.

I think I tried DOSbox, but I remember a show-stopper, maybe lack of 
printer support.

DOS emulation is not just for running games.  There are legacy business 
packages such as the one I use, that require a good emulator.  These 
packages were typically written in assembly language.  In my case, 
switching to a modern accounting package is not a just a matter of the 
cost of software.  The greater cost is the huge amount of time I would 
need to spend to manually convert about 10 business general ledgers to a 
new accounting package.

Fred

On 07/11/2013 07:56 AM, Paul Crawford wrote:
> Dear Devyn,
>> 3. What is we spoke with the DOSbox developers about merging the two
>> projects? Why have two DOS emulators for Linux? Why have to separate
>
> I am not very sure about how DOSbox is implemented, but I think they
> have rather different approaches to the issue of running DOS
> applications under alternative operating systems. There is also the
> option of booting MS-DOS, etc, in a VMware virtual machine, etc, to add
> to the list of options for DOS software.
>
> However, in our case the attraction of dosemu for Linux comes down to
> two points:
>
> 1) The option for direct hardware access, thus allowing old software to
> communicate with old hardware, but under the management of a secure
> networked system (e.g. access to NFS drives, remote log-in via SSH, time
> keeping accurate using NTP, etc).
>
> 2) Good emulation of file system access, so DOS applications can work
> with Linux file systems and see them in a reasonably sensible manner
> (e.g. all file names mapped to lower case on the Linux side, upper on
> DOS side, etc). VMware's shared folders do not work very well in this
> aspect (though using Samba you can get something reasonable, but then
> with Windows networking, so not really a DOS solution).
>
> These are not generally requirements for running an old DOS game, but
> they are exceedingly useful for keeping tried & trusted hardware &
> software going where the alternative of a new system involving a
> complete re-write may be either impossible (no source code, etc) or
> simply impractical.
>
> Regards,
> Paul