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
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