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If you're a fan of DOSBox, you might like this: http://www.doshaven.eu/
I love the fact that people are still making games for DOS. I've been playing a bit of this: http://www.doshaven.eu/game/ptakovina/ (from 2017!)
I was going to ask what languages/frameworks they use, but found this easily enough:
You can also download the Digital Mars C and C++ compilers for DOS here:
I have to say, the stylesheet for that page is amazing and gives me such nostalgia.
Allegro + DJGPP does miracles
What's missing is a multitasking library (not sure Allegro offers something to that effect)
Get a GPDWIN2 turbo back to the 80s.
You can run DOSBox in your browser, the Internet Archive has a bunch of games emulated that way,
Oh my god. It's astounding what becomes possible as we move further into this era when most digital activity gets archived for future mashups and other archaeology.
Here, I released this in 1996:
https://archive.org/details/msdos_Aspetra_1996
I knew people still played it, but I had no idea it had a freaking URL now!
My favorite (mis)use of Dosbox was using it to drive Symate for PLC programming. That let me switch to using a Linux netbook instead of dragging a laptop booted in DOS around a factory.
My notes from the time: https://sites.google.com/site/waspvm/runningsymate374underdo...
Same here, we had some buggy PLC controller software that would only run properly on increasingly hard-to-find old PCs, or more expensive embedded kits, due to timing issues. This was in an electroplating plant so they corroded to the point of needing replacement every year or so. Instead, with DOSBox set to an appropriate clock speed, we could use any commodity PC.
Did a similar thing with engraver software (which had a parallel port hardware serial key dongle that DOSBox allowed access to) and a dBASE IV program at a client's factory. Amazing piece of emulation that enables "ancient" code to run forever in small businesses around the world.
I used Dosbox to run a program to upload source code on old GE PLCs in order to covert to new systems. Couldn't have done it otherwise. Long live Dosbox!
DOSEMU is a really good option for this this sort of thing. On github development continues here -
Did something similar for some ancient Clipper apps I had to maintain after migrating to OSX/Linux. It was more practical than dosemu.
Does anyone know why they haven't released a new version going on 8 years now even though it looks like it's been continually worked on according to http://source.dosbox.com/dosboxsvn.txt?
Yes, they are stuck with technical debt which, let's say, they cannot repay.
Therefore further development on it is really difficult. This was stated by the developer in an interview some 5 years ago.
Do you happen to have a link to that interview? I'd love to read about it
What is "technical debt?"
DOS isn't getting any newer...
There's also NightKernel[0]...
"The Night kernel is a 32-bit drop-in replacement for the original 16-bit kernel of the FreeDOS operating system. It uses linear memory addressing and operates in protected mode on the Intel x86 architecture. The typical user will retain compatibility with their DOS applications and gain protected mode abilities such as task switching between applications..."
At it's infancy but you can add RSS[1] to follow the discussion.
[0] https://github.com/mercury0x000d/NightKernel
[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/feed/night-dos-kernel/msgs/r...
More feed options here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!aboutgroup/night-dos-kerne...
actually, it kinda is. FreeDOS has added a lot of nice features over the last few years. http://www.freedos.org/
Emulation's difficult, even for well-known platforms. Dosbox emulates a large variety of hardware, quirks in various DOS versions, and runs on a ton of platforms, but it doesn't do any of those things absolutely perfectly, and there's room for improvement in its hardware support. Plus, compiler and environmental changes need occasional maintenance.
Just this month I had to update some (very old) production code for a client, and when we pulled the project out of cold storage we discovered that the compiler wouldn't run on the Windows 64-bit command line.
DOSBox saved my bacon, and it wasn't the first time.
I had the same thing with concrete structural integrity calculations software written in BASICA. Still useful.
Maybe you could compile these with QB64.
(Quick Basic was the descendant of BasicA and largely compatible).
Any reason why this is up on HN? Is there a new release or something?
There's a certain mean time between new HN users rediscovering things.
*Which is fine, because after all, Hacker News is all about the comments. I don't mind re-discussing fine pieces of software or topics like these every once and a while.
That’s what I was wondering. Now and then, I see popular submissions here that I thought were common knowledge.
Not sure myself... It looks like the latest release (0.74) was nearly eight years ago. That's not to say that it isn't an extremely useful and well-made tool, and perhaps doesn't really need a whole lot of updating.
My favorite use (I mean, aside from the more obvious uses, like to run my GOG and Steam games, along with disks from my childhood) is to compile it with heavy debug enabled, and using it in conjunction with IDA to debug game issues.
It's actually got a fairly nice debug environment.
Before dosbox there were dosemu (which let you use hardware but was pain to configure) and things like qemu (emulate any hardware but even more pain to configure). You still had to install OS into VM. Dosbox just changed the rules of this emulation game. It was unbelieveably good even when it didn't do 32 bit yet.
Regarding DosEmu. How about the main developer presenting on it in 2018 from FosDem! https://mirrors.dotsrc.org/fosdem/2018/AW1.121/dosemu_and_fr...
I seem to remember using dosemu on early Linux on the console, and was amazed at seeing my graphics card perform its POST BIOS run on-demand - the first few times, I thought Linux had spontaneously rebooted, but it was just dosemu getting ready to run VESA graphics, IIRC. Or maybe I'm just misremembering?
Also worth mentioning, http://js-dos.com/ offers an API to load an emscripten build of dosbox and a DOS program of your choice.
Just wanted to mention 86box, which is a "spin-off" of PCem, actively maintained:
https://github.com/86Box/86Box
with "nightly builds" available, besides the Source Code.
It's a fork of PCem, but PCem is also actively maintained.
>It's a fork of PCem, but PCem is also actively maintained.
Yes, of course.
As I see it PCem is more "stable", whilst 86box is a little more "dynamic".
Since it offers (experimental but) "optimized" builds for certain processors:
http://ci.86box.net/job/86Box-Optimized/
in some cases it is conveneient.
http://blog.yesterplay80.net/dosbox-ece-en/
Community Edition. Seems to be some popular tweaks built in. Probably a good place to actually start.
DOSBox is also a great little debugger for x86 applications! It comes built with some excellent debugging features.
Qemu is a great platform to emulate x86 including numa machines
How many different early-90s display adapters, audio adapters, and such does it emulate? It also means that you'd have to source the OS and drivers. If the goal is to run old DOS games, Dosbox is generally more convenient.
I'm not sure how Qemu would emulate a NUMA arch on a non-NUMA machine.
It doesn't even attempt to emulate different memory models WRT where you need barriers AFAIK.
You can
Use -smp 8 -numa node,nodeid=0 -numa node,nodeid=1
why is this trending?
Is it still being developed? They should move the repo from Sourceforge to some better platform.
Last commits are from February 2018, so I guess it is.
If you can't stand SourceForge or Subversion, there's a very unofficial and irregularly updated mirror of their VCS on GitHub: