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 -- Dr. Paul S. Crawford Satellite Station Dundee University Small's Wynd, Dundee, DD1 4HN, U.K. Tel: +44 (0)1382 38 4687 Email: psc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx The University of Dundee is a Scottish Registered Charity, No. SC015096 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-msdos" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
