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Dosemu v1.0 Released
Several people have noted that Dosemu has version 1.0 on their ftp servers. The comment that most people had was to test whether it could run Duke Nukem 3D *grin*.
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Too bad DOSEMU doesn't run on my alpha. I'm going to spend all tonight playing Commander Keen and Duke Nukem 2. BTW, if you want some classique DOS games, check out www.gangsters.org. They're the best for really old games. And I thought DOSEMU was dead!
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a funny comment: 1 karma
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this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
Nothing like using a rehash of a 30-year old OS to emulate a 20-year old OS.
Linux Community, thy name is creativity. Hats off to ya.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Aaah, it takes me back to the time when I was about 14 years old, I had gotten my first computer, (it was a 486SX2 with 4MB) and I was using DOS as it was a REAL operating system. Sure, those other quiche eating wimps may use Windows 3.1, but I'm a real man (at 14, yeah right) who uses a REAL system. A CLI.
:)
:-)
I remember playing Doom, Doom ][, (always done with the backwards brackets) using some obscure phone program to dial my favorite BBS (it was called "Cyberia" -- how lame is that
I remember ridiculing edlin. I didn't think that it was possible to have an editor that was worse than edlin. Surely, edlin was the most pathetic program ever written. (Well, it wasn't, but I thought it was at the time. In all actuality, the most pathetic programs ever written were my early attempts at QBASIC)
And then all of the tricks shared with friends, like putting high-ascii characters in filenames so they couldn't be deleted by conventional means, (because you couldn't type the filename) and looking at virus source code trying to figure out what the hell "mov" and "cmp" stood for.
My progression went from Dos->windows->linux. It reminds me of a Pearl Jam song ("I'm Open") -- "Illusion was traded for Reality...no tradebacks. So this is what it's like to be an adult".
Dosemu is a total time machine for me. I use it every now and then to go back to my "roots" of computing. It's a personal thing, and probably isn't interesting to many people, but it's a holy shitload of fun for me.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
Back in pre-1.0 days, I learned to like Linux and live without windows and dos. While I'm sure that dosemu and wine are a lot better than they were 4-5 years ago, I also suspect M$ is constantly coming out with new APIs and API extensions to create incompatibilities.
One has to wonder, if DOSEMU and WINE became fully functional, if we'd just see a repeat of what is happening with DeCSS and the MPAA. Maybe M$ could claim that their contorted API is in fact a copy protection scheme.
Also, big business has an incentive to let people slave away on free projects and then hit them hard as they are just hitting the market, so that the developers are fully demoralized. Helps convince others to go away.
Opinions?
However, I have a solution to this problem. Simply run the user-land version of Linux under Linux. Then, run the Archimedes version of Linux under the xarch emulator under the user-land Linux. Then, run an xterm over to the original Linux layer, in which you run dosemu.
You will now have a computer that will run at the "classic" 8086 speed, so that you can play all of your favourite games, without seeing just a horrible blur.
(It'll also allow you to extensively test all these emulators for bugs, whilst you're at it. :)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Dosemu has been working really good as far as emulation goes. It could be a little faster - but I'm not complaining there. I loved playing Carmageddon (the first one) under dosemu nearly 2 years ago. However one critical component still seems to be missing - sound!
The README.txt for DOSEMU v1.0 pl0.0 says:
" The sound driver is more or less likely to be broken at the moment.
Anyway, here are the settings you would need to emulate a SB-sound
card by passing the control to the Linux soundrivers."
Until sound is working game play is fairly limited.
Joseph Elwell.
Free Software projects need them.
DOSEMU Only Seams to Emulate X86 Microcircutry Under Unix.
The actual Dos you run with Dosemu is a separate package ( Freedos or Caldera Open Dos are prime candidates ). This of course is the only way to really do it since so many Dos programs did most of there work by going around the OS and dealing with the hardware directly.
Now that Dosemu runs and has even used substantial hardware trickery ( AKA X86 protected mode ) it will let your 1GHz Athelon under Linux run the same software as that old PS/2 under Dos. But faster.
A few questions though. Windows 3.1 actually sort of worked under some versions of it ( I'll check if it boots in the full 1.0 release ) and Windows applications still go around the OS when they feel like. What are the odds of getting this to help out the emulation mode of WINE? As an API for porting old application Wine is OK of course, but it leaves a lot to be desired in the emulation department ( maybe that's why they don't call it 1.0 ? ). Could running Wine and Dosemu together improve on that somehow ?
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
On a completely different note, I used to use DOSEMU to play Heretic and Descent under Linux in the days before there were native versions, and it was great. It can only have improved since then. I understand they've even got graphics working in a window under X now.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
VMware has figured out how to get around the aspects of the x86 architecture that don't virtualize properly. If Dosemu could do those same tricks, that would be truly cool.
Of course, there is the FreeMWare project, which aims to do just that. From a brief look, it seems that they have to scan the instructions before execution to find instructions that have to be emulated.