DOS Emulation Under Linux - a Simple Guide

David Precious writes "With just a little work, it's possible to get your Linux system to run DOS applications with very little trouble. Whether you need to run some legacy corporate application, or just want to play some of those old classic DOS games, it's easy to get going. To make it easy, I've produced a simple guide to explain it. Hopefully it'll be of use to some people."

Comments

Duke Nukem 3D

[DigiShaman]

Will it play Duke Nukem 3D....forever?

Re:Duke Nukem 3D

[croddy]

*i* couldn't get dn3d to run on dosemu+freedos, but it may be possible, particularly if you use, say, MSDOS 6.2 instead of freedos.

Re:Duke Nukem 3D

[n3k5]

*i* couldn't get dn3d to run on dosemu+freedos, but it may be possible, particularly if you use, say, MSDOS 6.2 instead of freedos.

DOSBox claims to run Duke Nukem 3D.

By the way, does anyone know if there is a free program like DOSEMU/DOSBox for MacOS?

Re:Duke Nukem 3D

[Joel Carr]

Not sure about DOSEMU, but DOSBox will run Duke Nukem 3D. However, from their FAQ:
Does Duke Nukem 3D Run?
Yes, but don't expect it to run smooth or fast or whatever

Now does it run Duke Nukem 3D Forever? Well if it won't, atleast no one else will be able to play it either... :)

---

Re:Duke Nukem 3D

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out bochs.

Re:Duke Nukem 3D

[n3k5]

Excellent tip, thanks. I completely forgot about the existence of bochs since I last tried it on my PII and and the emulation of the mere DOS prompt was too slow. However, it could be worth trying it out on the G4.

Re:Duke Nukem 3D

[slux]

I suggest you try Icculus' Duke Nukem 3D GNU/Linux port if you want to play it rather than fiddling with dosemu or dosbox (which will surely be too slow as it emulates the entire cpu).

The same goes for all the games mentioned in the guide - Quake, Wolf3D, Doom all have versions that can be run natively on GNU/Linux and some are also greatly enhanced. Schorched Earth's original version isn't but several remakes are. The Linux Game Tome is a good starting place if you wish to obtain these.

It's interesting how it might be easier to run legacy Dos apps in GNU/Linux than in Windows (XP) these days. My friend's been dreaming of running a certain old dos game on his WinXP system, but all he has is Dosbox which doesn't run it and even if it did, it would be unplayably slow.

Re:Duke Nukem 3D

[Joseph Lam]

Ok,
It doesn't run Duke Nukem 3D Forever.
It does run Duke Nukem 3D however.
It can run Duke Nukem 3D forever.
It won't run Duke Nukem 3D smooth or fast or whatever

Re:Duke Nukem 3D

[CableModemSniper]

I've gotten it to run, under freedos + dosemu but really really really slooooowly.

Re:Duke Nukem 3D

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually. Duke3D/Doom and many other old DOS games work, and they work with sound too. =) Nice to run good old FastTracker in :)

However, the DOS emulation in Windows XP does not emulate the network layer so network gaming does not work =(.

True though, it is not very fast as it runs through an emulated hardware layer.

Re:Duke Nukem 3D

[FrostedWheat]

You do know there is a native Linux version of Duke3D now? Google for it. I'm running it here and it works really well.

Re:Duke Nukem 3D

[Elektroschock]

I was able to run qbasic inside of dosbox and loaded gorilla.bas. Ausgerechnet Bananen... Everything that worked on your 386 - 25 will work in dosbox as well. however text based applications are still mysterious.

Re:Duke Nukem 3D

[Anonymous Coward]

Is def possible, I did it before, look in the sample config to see some things that need to be turned on...
Unfortunately don't have dn3d to test atm.... remember to turn on some dpmi....
nice patched dosemu available at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dosemu-stable/
if you put on dos7 and enable long filenames in the config, it's quite nice :)

Re:Duke Nukem 3D

[Anonymous Coward]

Icculus.org claims to have a port of Duke3d for Linux http://www.icculus.org/duke3d

Anonymous Coward claims it runs rather stable, despite the warning. YMMV.

Re:Duke Nukem 3D

[sw155kn1f3]

I certainly remember we played duke3d deathmatch about 2 years ago on win2k. I din't think XP is any different. Heh ;-) that was FUN!
Although it works only on LAN. And you should install IPX protocol on your network adapter.

Re:Duke Nukem 3D

[Anonymous Coward]

Off topic but anyway..
At work, we use DOS network boot disks (boot cdrom's actually) for imaging workstations via Ghost and Powerquest. The boot disk also creates a ram drive on the local machine for space to extract utilities from the boot disk. I've added a bat file that loads a mouse driver and pulls the entire D3D directory over from a network share into the ram drive and launches the game from ram. D3D is only about 50MB so it only takes a few seconds for the transfer. Works great for network play also. I have not messed with getting the DOS sound drivers working but not a big deal. When your done playing, eject the bootable cdrom and power cycle the machine.

Re:Duke Nukem 3D

[Lord Kano]

My friend's been dreaming of running a certain old dos game on his WinXP system, but all he has is Dosbox which doesn't run it and even if it did, it would be unplayably slow.

Tell your friend to look into something called VDMS. I use it to run DOS games under XP. It does a great job of emulating Sound Blaster hardware in a DOS Box. It is awful for games that heavily use the PC speaker though...

Re:Duke Nukem 3D

[versus]

dosemu or dosbox (which will surely be too slow as it emulates the entire cpu)

Neither DosEmu nor DosBox emulate entire CPU. They are emulating only BIOS and DOS services (API) and specific protected-mode CPU commands. All other CPU instructions are executed in native x86 mode. That's why DosEmu/DosBox work only at x86 linux - you need Bochs to emulate x86 on Alpha/ARM/etc.

Re:Duke Nukem 3D

[Ziviyr]

Well, DOSBox is damned slow and gives you an odd form of speed control for not emulating the CPU.

Re:Duke Nukem 3D

[slux]

If you look at some other comments in this thread, you'll see that there are versions of Dosbox available for LinuxPPC, MacOS X etc. It really does emulate the CPU as well, you can see information about which instructions are working and which aren't at the Dosbox site (they recently reached 386).

It does work pretty well for games designed to run on a 386 or less but that's about it. Performance enhancements have been promised to be made eventually though.

Re:Duke Nukem 3D

[tap]

I'm sure it can be done. I remember when dosemu first added support for VGA graphics in an X11 window. One of the first things I did with it was run duke nukem 3d on it. It ran just fine in a window, and under the console it was faster in dosemu than in native dos.

I went to the campus comp sci lab, and had dn3d remote display on an NCD X terminal from my computer in my dorm room. Only got about 4 fps that way, but it was still pretty amazing. This would be sometime around the 1996.

Isn't this just ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... a simple guide to DOSEMU?! Where's the news, exactly?

Re:Isn't this just ...

[Anonymous Coward]

sure is disappointing... waited 3 hours for a new story and this is what we get.

Re:Isn't this just ...

[ottawanker]

You only waited 3 hours? You got it lucky, I've been waiting 10 years for a guide on how to use DOSEMU.

Re:Isn't this just ...

[InternationalCow]

I agree - but perhaps it is a good sign that there are now Linux users who need this kind of hand holding :) I remember that, in the old days (eg, a year ago or so) one was supposed to RTFM and figure it out. Not any more?

Re:Isn't this just ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, now we all just read the fscking howto, copy and paste the commands, and drool over the pretty screenshots...

Re:Isn't this just ...

[golgotha007]

nope, not anymore.
now you just gotta RTFA.

Re:Isn't this just ...

[1u3hr]

I fail to see much newsworthy in an article that tells you to: (this is the ENTIRE substance of the article)

At this point, you need to obtain the version of FreeDOS used by DOSEMU. Snag the binary version from the DOSEMU download page - it'll be named something like dosemu-freedos-b9-bin.tgz. Save it into the directory you've decompressed DOSEMU into.

Now execute the following commands:
mv dosemu-freedos-b9-bin.tgz dosemu-freedos-bin.tgz
make install

You no longer need to be root, so type exit to go back to your own shell.

You can now type xdosemu to start DOSEMU in a new X window. Before it can start for the first time, it'll ask you a few simple questions. Press enter to accept the defaults to each question.

The rest is just a list of "classic DOS games" you can play.

News?

Re:Isn't this just ...

[toddestan]

Well, even the veteran Linux users might appreciate something like this, which basically showcases a program, and what it can do. I had heard of DOSEMU, but hadn't given it a whole lot of thought. Now I'm determined to get SimCity 2000 and Master of Orion going in DOSEMU.

Re:Isn't this just ...

[gooman]

Well I agree, its not exactly news, but hey, its Saturday.
What do you want, another SCO story?

And if DOSemu doesn't work for some reason . . .

[Selanit]

. . . you can also try DOSbox, which is a virtual DOS machine.

WP 5.1!!!

[j-pimp]

Quite possibly the greatest word processor ever!!!. WordPerfect 5.1 for dos. If I could get the source code for this, I'd gladly attempt to port it to run under linux natively.

Re:WP 5.1!!!

[krymsin01]

edlin owns them all.

Re:WP 5.1!!!

[Bagels]

You'll have to talk to Corel, as they're the ones that own it now (they're on version 11 currently).

Re:WP 5.1!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I, for one, don't want to go back to only using fonts that reside in the printer you have currently attached and have everything messed up when the document had to be printed elsewhere.

Besides that, there were severe graphics issues, you had to have them in the arcane .wpg format.

Let WP (at least the 5.1 kind) die already!

Give me LaTeX anyday...

Re:WP 5.1!!!

[njdj]

Besides that, there were severe graphics issues, you had to have them in the arcane .wpg format.

Actually .wpg is a well-documented format.

About 14 years ago I remember writing a library for outputting charts in .wpg format. It wasn't too difficult because the docs were quite good. This was for vector graphics, though, which probably isn't what you want. There are free (as in beer) Windows programs which convert other formats to wpg; a quick Google turned up Paint Shop Pro, there must be others. On Linux there is ImageMagick which is also downloadable at no charge.

Re:WP 5.1!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

arcane != undocumented

Re:WP 5.1!!!

[salesgeek]

I, for one, don't want to go back to only using fonts that reside in the printer you have currently attached and have everything messed up when the document had to be printed elsewhere.

LOL! How little things have really changed. My current era MS Word, Lotus WordPro and WP 11 all have problems with formatting when I switch from my Lexmark to a Canon ink jet as the Canon supports edge to edge printing where the Lexmark doesn't. WP would have font issues - if a printer wouldn't have a given font in would usually default to 10 Pitch whatever...

Back in the day, as now if you were doing publication ready stuff, you had to use the right tools - and wordprocessors are not and never have been up to the task!

Re:WP 5.1!!!

[iantri]

You might find it interesting that WP 5.1 WAS ported to UNIX.. unfortunately, it is not available anymore and would probably require a fair bit of modification to get running on anything modern (back to the source code issue).

There were several versions of the graphical WordPerfect available for Linux.. google and you will find a guide to getting them running on a modern distro.

Unfortunately, only the very crippled personal version is available for free, and since Corel killed all their Linux stuff, you can't get it anymore.

Re:WP 5.1!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

since Corel killed all their Linux stuff, you can't get it anymore.

Rumor has it Corel is going to take another go at Linux. We'll have to wait and see if this is true.

Re:WP 5.1!!!

[mrmez]

I remember hating that app when I had to use it at a temp position I had for a few months, but I was coming from MacWrite II rather than from DOS apps. I occasionally remember it with some fondness when forced to deal with WinWord these days.

Re:WP 5.1!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

edlin owns them all.

Nay....REAL TYPISTS used

C:\copy con prn

Re:WP 5.1!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

First of all, you can make a .ps file.

Secondly, one thing that DOS/WP5.1 can do that Linux can't, is make a single 1.44MB boot floppy that has the OS, WP5.1 (stripped, without the spellchecker lib and a few other things), and every printdriver on it.

Someone who teaches school, for example, can make up their handouts and tests at home on a very reliable machine, and then fit a whole semester's worth of handouts, the OS and WP, on to a floppy and go to school, pop it in the $4,000 computer from Dell with expensive fast laser printer/copier and the OS that is always virused by kids seeking to sabotage the test, and print it out.

CDs are cheap enough that you could have your own setup of Linux + LaTeX + LyX and drivers on a bootable CD, but linux and all that stuff won't fit on a floppy. In fact, by the time you add in just enough of X to pre-view before you print, you can't even make it on a 64 MB USB drive.

I would probably pay $200 for linux version of WP5.1, which I had in source form so I could re-compile it as libc and the kernel evolved.

(If you want to run WP5.1 on linux, you can get the binaries for SCO from somewhere (a licensed version of SCO, preferably) and run it under linux-abi emulation after copying the appropriate SCO libraries to your linux system. That uses too much proprietary software to be a long term solution.)

To approach doing what DOS and WP can do, you would have to take a stripped-down 2.2 kernel, some small editor with syntax highlighting such as mcedit or qe, and integrate into the editor a hot key that would run LaTeX and pop up a previewer using SVGAlib. I gave up that project about 10th time SVGAlib crashed my linux -- that shit really needs to be fixed.

Re:WP 5.1!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

That link just gives you an address to write to in order to buy documentation of the format. That address is no longer working, I believe, because the Word Perfect Corporation got bought by Corel a long time ago.

Corel could have ported WP 5.1 or 5.2 or even 6 to Linux a long time ago, had it working in console mode, and sold hundreds of thousands of copies at $50 a pop or so. You can't really save suicidally managed companies. All you can do is pray that when they finally go under, some ex employee posts the code on the net somewhere.

Re:WP 5.1!!!

[biobogonics]

You might find it interesting that WP 5.1 WAS ported to UNIX.. unfortunately, it is not available anymore and would probably require a fair bit of modification to get running on anything modern (back to the source code issue).

IIRC, Word Perfect came *from* Unix. LLAIAGFA, there was a CP/M program called "Perfect Writer" which looked like a clone of EMACS. I'm fairly certain Word Perfect inherited itself from that. I also remember seeing and using native WP on Unix and Xenix. If you look at even the earliest WP 3.x documentation, you will see references to a generic keyboard lay out, ie {meta key} + {some other key}.

Why not just run native Linux/Unix/BSD apps?

Re:WP 5.1!!!

[mabinogi]

Actually, it does....

Look it up. The definitions I find are "understood or known by only a few" , "hidden, secret", "requiring secret or mysterious knowledge"

It's pretty hard to be arcane and well documented at the same time, though I will agree that undocumented doesn't necesarily mean arcane.

Re:WP 5.1!!!

[j-pimp]

I, for one, don't want to go back to only using fonts that reside in the printer you have currently attached and have everything messed up when the document had to be printed elsewhere.
Their were third party font tools for WP available. There were alot of other flaws in WP, as well as alot of unique ideas. The reveal codes option was a nice view. The knee jerk reaction to that is of course to use XML and just have a "view source option" like most HTML editors. However, if you are editing a binary file, a psudo Markup tag view is useful. It was a good tool, with some unique features. I think the best comparison would bo to midnight commander. They booth have some really useful features, and while not exactly hip and sexy, some people find them damn useful.

Keen!!

[Cyclopedian]

Bah, if I'm going to emulate DOS on linux, I'd rather play Commander Keen. =P

-Cyc

Re:Keen!!

[croddy]

runs surprisingly well, as does duke nukem 2 :-)

Re:Keen!!

[Nucleon500]

I get flickering, even with Fix Jerky Motion and SVGA Compatibility on. Oh, well.

Re:Keen!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Even on old hardware, using DOSEmu, DukeNukem3D runs more than fast enough to be playable - and it's been this way for years!

I run it on an old Pentium 2 400mhz, with crappy graphics hardware...

A slower Pentium 2 with a better card should run it fine as well, I wouldn't be surprised if a fast Pentium with a really good graphics card would run it fast.

In general, I can get stuff to run in DOSEmu. I wish I could say the same for Wine ;(

Old DOS goodies

[el_avatar]

I hope it will handle Duke3D, along with some others too... like Ultima Underworld I and II, anybody remember those games??? Pretty much the first FPS, well, without the S, unless you substitute "slasher" for "shooter".

Re:Old DOS goodies

[Kent Recal]

Dungeon Master.

Re:Old DOS goodies

[HawkPilot]

Anybody remember Abuse?

I remember the game ran really fast on a 486DX100. It had the end of stage game save like console games -- unique for the time. Anyone know if it runs under DOSEMU?

Re:Old DOS goodies

[Anonymous Coward]

On my FreeBSD box it's in /usr/ports/games/abuse... Fun game.

Quake?? Doom??

[j-pimp]

Perhaps he's not aware of the many open source ports of these two for linux with improved EVERYTHING. I reccomend the freedoom wad replacement and legacydoom.

Re:Quake?? Doom??

[GoneGaryT]

Wasn't that originally called the french wad?

Re:Quake?? Doom??

[j-pimp]

In the french wad all the monsters either cursed at you, surrendered, or took a nap and then fired nuclear warheads at you.

Re:Quake?? Doom??

[Anonymous Coward]

Link plz???

Re:Quake?? Doom??

[Billly Gates]

Just do not run legacydoom under FreeBSD. That port really sucks.

Re:Quake?? Doom??

[kryptkpr]

"But I am le tired!
so go take a nap.. THEN LAUNCH THE MISSILES!"

here's a link to the swf referred to, for those of you who don't have friends that compulsively forward everything funny they come across..

Re:Quake?? Doom??

[dolson]

Most people who praise emulators for gaming don't know about half of the games that are ported natively.

It's not a surprise.

just used it the other day...

[Anonymous Coward]

...to create one of those stupid Compaq ROMPaq floppy disks to update the BIOS of an old Compaq Proliant server. Works very well and since I don't have any Windows system anymore, it was the only solution ;)

Oh joy...

[graveyardduckx]

CLI emulating CLI. Seems redundant.... or even repetitive.

Re:Oh joy...

[Lusa]

Something similar used to be running an emulator inside another emulator. So you ended up with a chain of emulation. e.g. spectrum emulator inside a c64 emulator inside an amiga emulator inside...

Re:Oh joy...

[graveyardduckx]

Sorta like running Scorched Earth in DOS under Windows under Virtual PC on Linux under VMWare on Windows NT, right? ...I think I lost myself.

Oh no

[Anonymous Coward]

I see a new era of DOS-resident viruses comming up.

Re:Oh no

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not as much of a joke as you think. I have dos 6.22 disks I just used a few months ago to install a dos box. I hadn't touched the disks in years, but they have a couple of old viruses on them. I even managed to infect my win2k machine.

Re:Oh no

[Anonymous Coward]

"Your PC is now stoned!"

Re:Oh no

[Anonymous Coward]

Who said I was joking?

Re:Oh no

[Anonymous Coward]

That damn Form virus. I think it was still kicking around when Win 95 came out.

Re:Oh no

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, mod this up as "insightful". Anybody installing this on a Linux PC should know they're at risk of getting infected. No joke, actually!

Re:Oh no

[scotch]

The moderators. They're alwasy right, afterall

Now if only Windows could do the same thing, right

[aardwolf204]

Now if only we could get Windows to emulate DOS correctly, maybe then we could Play Duke3d in XP.

Industrial Programs?

[Linus Sixpack]

Has anyone made emulation work with Parallel port Dongles and Hasps? It seems that most of the emulators target dos games -- will they translate com and printer port calls ?

Some programs that "just work" are really a pain to change. I support a few of these that run on dos and I don't think there is a will to port them or replace them.

At this point Linux is much better maintained than dos and it would be a better fit if the programs ran perfectly? I know I'd like to dump dos.

LS

Re:Industrial Programs?

[krymsin01]

Dosemu does do com and lpt interfacing, and as for the dongles, I'd assume that that would be handled by your software.

Then again, I could be wrong... I need sleep.

Re:Industrial Programs?

[mrmeval]

I would like an emulator for linux on linux.

Old code that will no longer compile and that no one wants to fix to compile is a growing problem. There are some executables I'd like to run but they are not statically linked so the libraries are needed as are other resources.

I think that some of the older linux systems just won't work on new hardware. I've not tried to get one to work that was older than 2.2.x.

Actually this is more complex than I thought.

Re:Industrial Programs?

[Krunch]

Something like User Mode Linux ?

Re:Industrial Programs?

[Reinhard]

You have to run dosemu suid root to access devices and you have to enable device-access in dosemu.conf.
I use dosemu to support APL2 programs. Codepages work fine using my Novell DOS. (Freedos has no support for codepages yet). dosemu 1.3.0 from CVS works extremly well with X and codepages! I could not do that in modern windows! Windows 2k
does not support codepage 910 (APL Character set), dosemu does, even in X.

Re:Industrial Programs?

[Ed Avis]

To run older binaries you usually just need to make sure you have the old libraries installed. Get an old Slackware CD or whatever, copy the libraries and symlinks to /usr/lib/, and that should be it.

Re:Industrial Programs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows dlls are not much better and probably worse but at least you can still run old win32 binaries on an XP system without any problem usually.

Re:Industrial Programs?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because the DLLs are included in the installer package. Windows XP intercepts the file copy calls and puts the DLLs in the application's directory.

You still have the same problem of having the correct set of obsolete libraries, just that XP has a demon that sorts it out for you.

Re:And if DOSemu doesn't work for some reason . .

[Joel Carr]

DOSBox has the advantage that it can be run on more platforms than just Linux. It can even run on Windows if need be. I've personally found DOSEMU to be more usable speed wise in the past, however I've had less compatibility problems running dos programs in DOSBox than I have using DOSEMU + FreeDOS

---

Or do it the easy way.

[Anonymous Coward]

In real Linux distributions, click K (or G) > Configuration > Packaging > Install software

Enter root password
search for dos.
Tick the dosbox box. Click install.

All the depencancies are automagically resolved and your done in 10 seconds.

Then click
K > Applications > Emulators > Dosbox

Then volia, the c prompt is here haunt you.

Silly geeks, why do you make your life so hard when it can be so easy now days.

Re:Or do it the easy way.

[sholden]

Or even just:

# apt-get install dosemu

Re:Or do it the easy way.

[upside]

Because we geeks know the commandline is quicker. In Mandrake:

urpmi dosbox

Re:Or do it the easy way.

[Anonymous Coward]

"sorry, there is no operating system."
#apt-get install freedos
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
E: Couldn't find package freedos

?? :(

Re:Or do it the easy way.

[BrookHarty]

emerge dosemu
or
emerge dosbox (and dosbox-cvs for that newest version)

Gentoo has a nice collection of emulators.

Re:Or do it the easy way.

[Anonymous Coward]

And how is grandma going to install Debian? I remember a few weeks ago geeks were ejaculating on how debian got a new text mode installer, while the majority of all other linux distros have had GUI installers for YEARS.

I am sick of Debian fanboys screaming apt-get all the time, because the rest of debian is horrible. How do you get mice usb working? In other distros, they just work, Debian wants you to play with hundreds of files, invoving modprobing and IMPS/2 bullshit.

I used to use Debian, but I gave up, it was too hard to do real work, then I found the Mandrake Cooker, like debian unstable but without the un. Debian has lost a lot of mind share recently.

Re:Or do it the easy way.

[BrookHarty]

My url for all the Emulators didnt get included in the link.

Re:Or do it the easy way.

[sholden]

apt-get install dosemu-freedos

Though if you have DOS applications that you need to run, then surely you also have DOS...

(you are allowed to use apt-cache to find such things, in this case apt-cache search freedos, or apt-cache search dosemu, or apt-cache search dos will work. Depending on how much clutter you wish to soft through...)

Re:Or do it the easy way.

[sholden]

Who said grandma should be able to install Debian?

Grandma can use Redhat/Mandrake/Knoppix/whatever.

And my USB mouse worked by plugging it in, for what it's worth...

Re:Or do it the easy way.

[Anonymous Coward]

not found.
Would you mind sharing your sources.list?

Re:Or do it the easy way.

[sholden]

deb ftp://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/debian sid main non-free contrib
deb ftp://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/debian-non-us sid/non-US main non-free contrib

It's in contrib.

Re:Or do it the easy way.

[mcbridematt]

AFAIK aarnet mirror isn't accessible outside Australia and maybe New Zealand.

Re:Or do it the easy way.

[upside]

It's horses for courses, dude. And why is someone a "fanboy" the moment they say they like the current distro they use?

USB: Just choose the 2.4 kernel by typing bf24 after you put the coaster in the cup holder.

I've moved in the opposite direction away from Mandrake to Slackware. I just want a simple platform where I can compile the very latest server software from source without getting tangled up in package dependencies.

Installation is simple as well as you don't have to uncheck the 2 billion packages Mandrake (4 browsers!) and Debian want to install by default.

I still like Mandrake, but not for my current needs. For desktop use it's another matter altogether.

Re:Or do it the easy way.

[Bios_Hakr]

Real men prefer:

tar -zxvf dosbox.tar.gz
cd dosbox ./configure
Spend 30 minutes to resolve dependencies.
make
sudo make install
Spend 30 more minutes resolving a segfault.
Rebuild glibc with debugging support.
Rebuild dosbox.
This time it works with no segfault, but 50 other apps just broke because you rebuilt glibc.

You know, real men suck. Maybe it's time I try out one of these new-fangaled distribution thingies...

Re:Or do it the easy way.

[Anonymous Coward]

I did #urpmi dosbox and got:
no package named dosbox

Re:Or do it the easy way.

[cuban321]

Or: djimenez@bender djimenez $ emerge -s dos Searching... [ Results for search key : dos ] [ Applications found : 7 ] * app-emulation/dosemu Latest version available: 1.1.99.1-r1 Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ] Size of downloaded files: 3,146 kB Homepage: http://www.dosemu.org/ Description: DOS Emulator * app-misc/fixdos Latest version available: 1.3.1 Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ] Size of downloaded files: 14 kB Homepage: http://e.co.za/marius/ Description: Set of utilities such as crlf which converts files between UNIX and DOS newlines. * app-text/dos2unix Latest version available: 3.1 Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ] Size of downloaded files: 13 kB Homepage: Description: Dos2unix converts DOS or MAC text files to UNIX format * app-text/unix2dos Latest version available: 2.2 Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ] Size of downloaded files: 5 kB Homepage: Description: unix2dos - UNIX to DOS text file format converter * games-emulation/dosbox Latest version available: 0.60 Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ] Size of downloaded files: 528 kB Homepage: http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/ Description: DOS emulator * games-emulation/dosbox-cvs Latest version available: 20030809 Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ] Size of downloaded files: 0 kB Homepage: http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/ Description: DOS Emulator * sys-fs/dosfstools Latest version available: 2.8-r3 Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ] Size of downloaded files: 64 kB Homepage: ftp://ftp.uni-erlangen.de/pub/Linux/LOCAL/dosfstoo ls/ Description: dos filesystem tools

Re:Or do it the easy way.

[beeblebrox87]

Or, the even easier way, on REAL real distributions:

sudo apt-get install dosbox
[enter root password]
[dependencies magically resolved, package magically downloaded and installed]
dosbox

Seems a lot simpler to me, rather than futzing around waiting for X and KDE to start, searching for things, trying to figure out what menu everything will fall under, etc.

Silly GUIers, why do you make your life so hard when there has been a better way for the last 30 years.

Re:Or do it the easy way.

[beeblebrox87]

Why would you WANT a GUI installer? Much better to stay with something that always works, and leave more space on the install CD for packages. It's not as though the debian installer is difficult to use, it's dialog-based and all the options are clearly explained, with sensible defaults. Making it use a mouse instead of arrow keys would be a lot of effort for no measureable difference.

As for the usb mouse issue: there are packages available that resolve this automagically, though I agree it should happen by default.

Re:Or do it the easy way.

[dmayle]

Or do it the easiest way:
emerge dosbox

Re:Or do it the easy way.

[The Real Chrisjc]

If you want something like that, maybe you should consider trying Gentoo Linux?
You compile everything from source.
Its as easy as 'emerge dosbox' gets the full source, and compiles it as you want with any processor optimizations you want too :)

I wont touch anything else now!

Re:Or do it the easy way.

[scotch]

Don't you mean:

1. emerge dosemu
2. wait for 3 hours
3. emerge dosbox
4. wait for 5 hours
5. do something useful with your computer

?

Re:Or do it the easy way.

[Unregistered]

fink install dosbox, imo.

And that was so easy that i now have to wait because /. won't let you post within 20 seconds of hitting repy. can your "real" method do it that easily?

Re:Or do it the easy way.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you mean:

1. emerge dosemu
2. wait for 3 hours
3. emerge dosbox
4. wait for 5 hours
5. do something useful with your computer

?

Try upgrading from that 486. ;)

Re:Or do it the easy way.

[sholden]

Yes, but someone asked for my sources.list and that's it (of course I replied to the wrong post)...

Since it's a mirror, all the other mirrors will contain the same files, so what does it matter?

Re:Or do it the easy way.

[Bob Uhl]

Of course, you could just run nice emerge dosemu, and use your host for soemthing else in the meantime.

Unix: It's Pretty Damn Cool

what's the big deal?

[ultrapenguin]

Am I the only one who finds the articly higly lacking any useful info?

Sure, I haven't touched DOSEMU since about 1998 but back then I remember all sorts of problems.

Even now, the article mentions nothing about setting up sound, midi playback, etc, is this all handled automatically by dosemu installer (doubt it).

This guide seems to be written by someone who just found DOSEMU yesterday and didn't know anyone used it for years before.

I mean there's even DOSEMU-HOWTO written which is the official linux dosemu howto, what's wrong with that one? It seems to be even kept up-to-date (as popular dos is these days, anyhow).

And most of the games he mentions on the site have way better native linux ports...

Re:what's the big deal?

[krymsin01]

Same situation here, in regards to using dosemu. The last time I used was about three years ago (I think, could be off). It was because I was feeling nostalgic and wanted to screw around with qbasic. As I remember, dosemu at that point could even a screen mode higher than plain text reliably. At least it's nice to see they've progressed a bit.

Re:what's the big deal?

[urmensch]

Come again?

...dosemu at that point could even a screen mode higher than plain text reliably.

Re:what's the big deal?

[Anonymous Coward]

I had purchased William's Arcade Classics a few years back and was able to set it up to run with sound and VGA graphics under RH Linux 5.2 with DOSEMU, but damn was it a pain to get working right.

Re:what's the big deal?

[krymsin01]

Sorry about that. 3rd shift is eating my brain... That shoud read "...dosemu at that point couldn't even handle a screen..."

Re:what's the big deal?

[TeknoHog]

Agreed. I mean, the article explains how to install it from tarballs, but none of the important config details. For true newbies this is probably fine, but they should IMHO use a package from their distro, and anyway this is useless for the typical slashdotter.

Re:what's the big deal?

[ir0b0t]

I'm new to /. and read the posts, in part, to learn about tech subjects. I get a lot out of the exchanges, and the reading has turned out to be worth the effort because my learning curve is less steep. Your post, for e.g., let me know about the earlier HOWTO which I did not know. Its always been terrific when someone who understands something abstruse-to the-uninitiated takes time to point out shortcuts along the way or break down the more fundamental concepts. I just hope that's at least some of the purpose of /. because the reaction I get sometimes is less (ahem) hopspitable.

Re:what's the big deal?

[Anonymous Coward]

Please, please, please STOP rudeness like this. For goodness sake, no wonder so many people dislike Linux people. ultrapenguin may want to read the definition of "constructive criticism" - it may help.

This guy spent some time trying to help the Linux community - I say good on him. He didn't know better? So be it. Try to offer him some suggestions of how he could channel his energies and good will better than something spoken by the member of an elite English men's club "Am I the only one who finds the articly higly lacking any useful info?"

Let's try :-

We need people like this - who spend the time building the Linux community. A DOS how-to has already been written, and although it covers a bit more detail (setting up audio, etc) - there are plenty of FAQs that we all could contribute to. Please people, consider working toward a better Linux. I for one say thanks to this guy for his efforts. A united, coordinated Linux effort will benefit us all.

Sincerely,

unpretentiouspenguin
(aka anonymous coward)

Re:what's the big deal?

[BadDreamer]

You can doubt it if you want, but for me it handled sound automatically. I didn't even realize it supported sound until a game started playing music at me, and then blopped along happily.

It already had been!

[Anonymous Coward]

They call it Vi improved.

PCEmu

[kasperd]

Actually I have written my own PC emulator, but it is far from as usable as DOSemu. I wanted to test a way to do the emulation with only 16 bytes used for ROM. As long as it was fun I kept coding. But eventually I ran into some problems. If I actually wanted to use all the available 255KB of UMB the kernel would Oops when the stack was on the same page as my ROM. I fixed the kernel bugs together with Manfred Spraul and Stas Sergeev. But I never got back to coding on my emulator.

Re:PCEmu

[Joseph Lam]

I'm curious to know what are those 16 bytes in the ROM...must have been highly optimized :)

Re:PCEmu

[kasperd]

I'm curious to know what are those 16 bytes in the ROM...must have been highly optimized :)

The trick is, that when writing an emulator, you don't need to write a BIOS in 16 bit code. Instead a BIOS implementation is written in 32 bit code, that can execute outside the precious low end address space. Then I just need enough entry points from 16 bit code to 32 bit code. An entry points requires an instruction that will trap from virtual 86 mode to 32 bit user mode. I decided to use the HLT instruction which is only one byte. Because of the segment:offset addressing there are 4096 different ways to address this single byte, that means I have 4096 entry points which is a lot more than I need. The entry point for reboot is sometimes accessed through at least two different addressings, so I avoided to place my HLT instruction there and instead placed the conventional five bytes long far jump instruction there, which jumps to one of my entry points. After this five bytes instruction are eight bytes reserved for the BIOS date written as month / date / year. The last three bytes are three single byte instructions HLT IRET RETF. The HLT and IRET are actually used, the RETF I just placed there because it might come in handy. Because of the DOS memory management and the reboot entry point, there is no way to make the ROM smaller than 16 bytes.

To actually protect the ROM against writing I mark the entire page read only, though it is only the last 16 bytes I really need to protect. This means any write to the first 4050 bytes of this page will trap, those are the traps that I needed to fix in the kernel because they would Oops if triggered by a stack access by an instruction emulated in the kernel. All those traps of course slows down execution, so I might want to sacrifice the last 4050 bytes for a bit of performance. I'm still looking for an efficient way to access the last bytes. If I could put an upper limit to the address accessed by virtual 86 mode, I could switch between a limit just below the ROM and a write protected page, which I belive would speed up execution. Together with my emulator I have put a GPL'ed UMM driver that works with my emulator, quite conveniently this driver does not support the last 4050 bytes of UMB that have been causing problems anyway. EMM386 doesn't work with my emulator, and never will because of braindead Intel design.

Re:PCEmu

[pe1chl]

It is a nice idea.
In fact, dosemu already had some interesting possibilities for saving memory. I wrote the network driver for dosemu, it emulates a "PC/TCP packet driver". In a normal DOS system, that driver would be loaded in high memory, but in dosemu there was only a small block of code residing in the BIOS area (required because of the interface definition for packet drivers), and the actual driver code is 32bit.
So, dosemu can be considered to have "PC/TCP packet driver support in the BIOS", and no memory has to be wasted on loading a driver :-)

DOSemu

[DarkHelmet]

Thinking about DOSemu and DOSbox remind me of an old article in Wired about the Turbo Switch on computers.

"Having a turbo switch on your computer is kind of like saying 'I have this really cool ferrari that when I press a button it turns into a pinto'".

I downloaded Dosbox and played some of the old classics at a sluggish pace... They say that an XP 1800 with DosBox is the equivalent of a 386SX-25.

"Look ma! I have this cool little program that makes my Athlon 64 3200 into a 386SX-40! Isn't that swell?"

The sad thing is... I don't think I've ever been so happy about finding a program online.

I suck.

Re:DOSemu

[Anonymous Coward]

There are no SX-40's, only DX-40's.

Re:DOSemu

[pe1chl]

DOSemu runs the dosbox as a VM86 task, it should run at the full speed of the host processor. There will be some slowdown when you try to run graphic applications in an X window, but other than that there is no "emulation" going on.

DOSemu is not like VMware or even Virtual PC.

Re:DOSemu

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, thanks for clearing that up. Now if you could read, you'd see he said this:

They say that an XP 1800 with DosBox is the equivalent of a 386SX-25.

Do you see DOSemu mentioned in there?

Re:DOSemu

[FIGJAM]

I'm pretty sure there were SX-40s

AFAIR Intel made SX-33s and DX-33s and AMD made both SX and DX 40MHz 386s
I used to sell them

Re:DOSemu

[salesgeek]

Thinking about DOSemu and DOSbox remind me of an old article in Wired about the Turbo Switch on computers.

Actually, there were a large number of DOS applications that were coded in assembly for a 4.77Mhz PC. Faster computer would make these programs not work - and some were actual business applications and programs that interfaced with hardware that were written this way. The idea that PC archetecture would be around for 20+ years did not even cross the programmer's mind back then! Originally the purpose of the turbo button was to slow your blazing fast 10Mhz 8088 based PCXT clone to 4.77Mhz so you could software written for the stock IBM PC.

By the time the 386sx came out, the turbo button had lost it's function and the pinto analogy was appropriate. It was a great way to slow down games, though!

Re:DOSemu

[f1ipf10p]

I agree that having a button to slow you down seems silly today, but "back in the day" many games were timed based on the CPU clock.

When you tried to beat a "boss" that was designed in the days of a 6mhz 80286 on 40mhz 386DX you wanted the "pinto" speed effect of that "Turbo" button.

Seems irrelevant now, but getting your butt kicked at warp speed created the need for the short lived "Turbo" button...

But a valet switch for the Lightning to cut the supercharger would be a "pinto" effect mod I'd consider...

Re:DOSemu

[Tim Browse]

I found another use for it - when I was working on the team developing the first version of this, I had to make sure the rendering code was efficient for partial redraws (scrolling diagonally, floating windows). Also we used XOR plotting to do the selection UI, etc.

When you get redraw glitches with that, it's often hard to see what's going on. Pressing the turbo button on our 486-66 machines would turn them into a very slow PC, which made it really obvious where the redraw was screwing up :-)

Re:DOSemu

[scotch]

When you tried to beat a "boss" that was designed in the days of a 6mhz 80286 on 40mhz 386DX you wanted the "pinto" speed effect of that "Turbo" button.

Only if you think cheating is a fun way to play games.

Re:DOSemu

[tylernt]

Yeah, we HAD an AMD 40MHz 386. I remember thinking how much faster Descent I ran on it compared to the ol' 16MHz 286.

Funny how a I still think of a 40Mhz 386 as "fast".

Re:DOSemu

[f1ipf10p]

Scotch, you insenitive clod! You don't know me, so don't imply I cheat or condone it.

It is not cheating to play the game same or faster rate than the original programmer had intended, but at half of your system clock.

Most of the games that depended on the clockspeed of your CPU to determine the timing of actions in the game expected a 6 or 8 megahertz CPU.

The turbo button in the first 16 megahertz and faster systems was to provide a way to run games (and some other applications) at a usable speeds for required interactions.

From my earlier post that you quoted, half of a 40 megahetz clock was still 20.

20,000,000 > 8,000,000
20,000,000 > 6,000,000

Not a slower cheating fun way as you imply.

Re:DOSemu

[archen]

Ah the turbo button... surely that was the true golden age of IT.

User: "my computer is running slow..."
IT Guy: *Pushes magic button and computer actually runs faster!*

Re:DOSemu

[KC Swan]

"Having a turbo switch on your computer is kind of like saying 'I have this really cool ferrari that when I press a button it turns into a pinto'".

I'm guessing you never ran a program that was dependent on the processor clock speed to operate properly?

Back in the day, there were plenty of programs out there that had been written so they worked just fine on the current generation of computers. But then, when the next generation came out, they were way too fast.

In the early days of PCs, a popular practical joke program claimed to find water in your A: drive. You would sneak this into their autoexec.bat, and at boot up it would report this, spin the drive, and the speaker would make a noise that sounded somewhat similar to water going down a drain.

Before too long, the machines were fast enough that the drain noise sounded like little bells ringing for a few seconds.

A friend gave me a program that emulated the end of a Looney Tunes cartoon. A circle would open on the screen, and then it would spell out "That's All Folks", all while playing the Looney Tunes closing theme. I tried to use it on a borrowed computer at the end of a training program. It went "boop boop beep beep boop" and was done in about two seconds.

Turbo switches had their place. If you keep insulting those of us that used them, we'll beat you with our canes.

Best option...

[Markos]

The best option is to really just put together an old gaming box. Old hardware that will run dos like a dream is avaiable everywhere. Seems to be the best option instead of messing around with various emulators trying to get them to work with game xy and z.

Re:Now if only Windows could do the same thing, ri

[Phexro]

Or you could just wait. See, the delay with Duke Nukem Forever is that they've hidden the entire series of old Duke games in it as an easter egg, and they want them to work just right in Windows 95^H8^UMe^U2k^UXP.

Re:And if DOSemu doesn't work for some reason . .

[Anonymous Coward]

DOSBox will also run on non-x86 machines. Got MacOSX or LinuxPPC? Works.

Why this news?

[po8]

OK, I'm not getting why this article made the front page. The "tutorial" seems to consist of saying "download the software and install it", which shouldn't be too hard to figure out on one's own. The bulk of the tutorial content is pointers to four standard DOS games.

BTW, on Debian, the installation is "apt-get install dosemu-freedos". I was about to gloat about how easy that is, but it looks pretty darn easy under Slackware also. :-)

Re:Why this news?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you for not being an obnoxious Debian zealot.

Re:Why this news?

[Kent Recal]

In Soviet Russia the Obnoxious Debian Zealot is YOU!

Re:Why this news?

[el_chicano]

In Soviet Russia the Obnoxious Debian Zealot is YOU!

1. Install Debian
2. ???
3. Profit!!!

Re:Why this news?

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone who posted to this thread should be killed violently. ...

Oh shi

Re:Why this news?

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha, you're dead !!

Hm?

Scorched Earth

[ngtni]

Probably the best reason to run a DOS emulator is so you can play Scorched Earth (the mother of all games).

The author of the guide says he used to play Scorched in his Sixth Form, and the network admin would join in too... exactly like in my school! This game must have been more popular than I first thought. If you've never played it, you really should...

Re:Scorched Earth

[SharpFang]

Come on, get UAE and Scorched Tanks. Beats SE by far. (almost 200 weapons, many shields, several modes of battle)

Re:Scorched Earth

[Pete]

I mentioned this above, but anyway - you might like to try out the open-source, cross-platform and very cool Scorched Earth 3d

Pete.

Re:Scorched Earth

[timerider]

xscorch.
bzflag.
'nuff said.

Re:Scorched Earth

[ngtni]

I thank you sir!

Re:Scorched Earth

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot Scorched3d.

Re:Scorched Earth

[Ziviyr]

Shame it was written in AMOS, thats about my only gripe with that game.

Re:Scorched Earth

[SharpFang]

Come on, Amos wasn't bad. It was, to the day, the best "rapid development" language I know.
(of course waiting for half a hour on A600 for all the soil to drop after launching a Cascade was a problem)
Now that were times...
A homepage from my "early days" (it's years since I lost the password to this account :) with mu group's productions in Amos :)
http://members.tripod.com/~SharpFang/Amiga.htm l

Re:Now if only Windows could do the same thing, ri

[XJoshX]

Indeed. If I could run Scorched Earth in a window in XP I would be quite a happy man..

Re:And if DOSemu doesn't work for some reason . .

[n3k5]

What I miss on the DOSBox download page is a MacOS X binary (bochs has one). Had no luck with Google either ... anyone else, maybe?

Re:And if DOSemu doesn't work for some reason . .

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.holwegner.com/software/ has a MacOS X binary of DOSBox.

w00t!

[n3k5]

thanks, that's great.

DOSEMU / FreeDOS useful for embedded support

[barries]

There's still a dusty corner of systems design and programming that takes place on DOS: some embedded programming tools (compilers, flash burners, in circuit emulator debuggers) for some chips still work "best" on DOS.

Only now, we can use DOSEMU to run them under Linux and get the benefit of real development environment when supporting legacy apps. We can open a bash shell and use Perl, gnu make, emacs/vim, etc to drive development, then have a DOSemu / FreeDOS window to drive download and debug.

It can be quite difficult automating the Windows versions of these tools to that same level. Most of our projects use Windowes tool (running in VMware on Linux), but we did one two years ago hosted on DOSEMU and using Bytecraft's (now) excellent compiler for the PIC chips.

Best of both worlds, and many, many thanks to all the hackers that made it work so well.

- Barrie

Re:DOSEMU / FreeDOS useful for embedded support

[bhima]

HAve you ever tried using an EPROM burner with DOSEMU? I've got a couple of Needhams burners that connect via LPT1.

Re:DOSEMU / FreeDOS useful for embedded support

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not just tools like that. The team I'm on supports and develops for around 50,000 DOS systems running across the country.

Lately, we do initial testing of our programs under VMWare, which makes it more convenient than putting the .exe on a floppy. It also makes our desks less cluttered - fewer PC's on them.

I wonder if we could run those 50,000 systems under Linux with DOSEMU or similar and improve their supportability.

Re:DOSEMU / FreeDOS useful for embedded support

[Anonymous Coward]

"I wonder if we could run those 50,000 systems under
Linux with DOSEMU or similar and improve their supportability."

It surprises me a great deal that this didn't occur to you at least 8 years ago.

Except for IO issues, DOSEMU has been "there" for a lot longer than VMWare, and for some purposes I think it's actually better.

Thanks for posting this

[beforewisdom]

Hey;

Thanks for posting this.

Despite there being better options I get stuck doing some *.bat scripting at work.

Now I can practice some of this at home

Cool Beans

Thanks again

Steve

Re:Thanks for posting this

[JayBlalock]

.BAT scripting? In 2003? Jeeeeeezus. I don't even wanna ask how long it's been since they gave IT money for upgrades. You have my sympathies.

Re:Thanks for posting this

[JayBlalock]

Oh wait, it's 2004 now. Why didn't someone tell me?

Re:Thanks for posting this

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, don't knock bat scripting. Sure in the old days it was pretty limited, but on Windows 2000 and higher, batch files are much improved. New commands have been added. MS calls them command extensions. For example, the FOR command now has incremental loops as well as awk-like parsing of command output, strings and files. SET is improved with prompt strings and math expression evaluation. Other improvements are listed in the Command Line reference. Couple the added improvements with the Windows javascript interpreter, cscript, and batch files can kick some serious ass.

Re:Now if only Windows could do the same thing, ri

[Phwoar]

If you're willing to settle for Scorched Tanks instead of Scorched Earth, try WinUAE. You can get the Scorched Tanks disks almost completely legally from the Back2Roots project.

where are the purists?

[SethJohnson]

Why aren't all those anti-WINE people complaining that we should boycot DOSbox and DOSemu to put pressure on these developers to port the DOS apps over to LINUX proper?

slippery slope...

compromise..

I'm trying to be sarcastic and comedic.

Re:where are the purists?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, every dos app mentioned in that tutorial has been ported to linux =].

Re:where are the purists?

[Anonymous Coward]

People aren't using dosemu to run new applications. On the other hand, the wine emulator must die.

It's a bit ironic...

[DarkDust]

I'm still playing DOS games from time to time, like Dune 2. Now the ironic part is that I can't get the sound to work in DOS directly (laptop with an SiS chip, no DOS usable driver avaible) neither does the sound work under Windows ME... but it works without problems in Linux using DOSEmu since it emulates an SoundBlaster 16 and a General MIDI card :-)

leadership 'emulation' under ?pr firm? scriptdead

[Anonymous Coward]

hypenosys? they do all this just so they can have/keep too much, which is never enough? yikes?

EeeeXxxxEeelent.

[AngstAndGuitar]

I was just trying to get Betrayal at Krondor to work on a Similar system earlier today. (Slackware 9.1, 2.4.11, Dosemu, etc,)

Re:Now if only Windows could do the same thing, ri

[JKR]

DOSBOX works on Windows XP. May not be fast enough for some games (OMF2097 is _almost_ playable), but try here

Jon.

Old strategy games

[flamelord]

There are some good old strategy and rpg games out there that i find fun. I've never been too impressed with all the glitz and eyecandy of modern games.

With linux gaming in the state it is (though it is improving) it's good to see dosemu being improved on to the point where it is now better in some respects (more compatible) than emulation under windows. But DOS gaming only fills the current shortcomings.

Re:Old strategy games

[mrmez]

Just what I was looking for before starting a new top-level thread. My comment was going to be along the lines of: did anyone else see this article and think it was going to be refer to REAL CLI DOS games rather than a bunch of graphical shoot-em-ups? These days, it's easy to find games that require much practice, some skill, and little thought; finding good games which require much thought and little else is difficult.

Re:Old strategy games

[Anonymous Coward]

that's why there still is NETHACK !
(heck, they ported it to the agenda PDA:)

Re:And if DOSemu doesn't work for some reason . .

[JamesP]

I have to say I ran it under Linux and I am impressed....

Kudos to the DOSBox team, this has been needed for a long time...

I ran several games and they run smoothly (except for Protected 386 and newer games, because of speed issues)

The main problem with it is emulation speed... but again, it's a hell of a jog what they've done.

DOSBox and Mac OS X.

[Xenex]

"By the way, does anyone know if there is a free program like DOSEMU/DOSBox for MacOS?"

There is a DOSBox package in Fink.

Re:DOSBox and Mac OS X.

[squiggleslash]

Don't know if anyone else is getting the same problem, but I can't get dosbox to appear in my fink packages list, not even if I go into finkcommander's preferences and select the "show unstable packages" option. I do get unstable packages, just not dosbox.

Not that it matters that much. I'm trying to compile it from source now, and all I needed to install seperately was SDL (which I used Fink to do.) But I'm curious to know if anyone had the same problem.

fink rocks btw.

Re:DOSBox and Mac OS X.

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Fink does indeed rock, but you don't need it (and I don't recommend it) to get DOSBox. Click this link to download a binary. (And if you're wondering where that link came from, and are justifiably nervous about downloading a binary because some dude on /. said so, I got the link from here, a comprehensive list of PC emulators for Mac. The DOSBox entry is most of the way down the page.) No fuss involved in installation; it Just Works, the way all the best Mac software does.

Re:DOSBox and Mac OS X.

[twoshortplanks]

Er:

osaka:~ mark$ /Users/mark/Desktop/DOSBox_OSX/dosbox; exit
dyld: /Users/mark/Desktop/DOSBox_OSX/dosbox can't open library: /sw/lib/libSDL-1.2.0.dylib (No such file or directory, errno = 2)
Trace/BPT trap

Looks like the binary requires you to have installed SDL from fink in order to work

A lame question, but...

[Trurl's Machine]

...can it be compiled for MacOS X or Linux/PPC - or is it somehow dependent on physical x86?

Re:A lame question, but...

[slim]

DOSEmu relies on a real x86 processor.

You could instead use Bochs to emulate an x86.

Re:A lame question, but...

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Use DOSBox instead of Bochs, is my recommendation. I'm overjoyed to be able to play all my old DOS games on my iBook.

Re:A lame question, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

DOSEmu relies on a real x86 processor

Does it? I have it running fine on an Athon XP.

Re:A lame question, but...

[caseih]

See above posts on the dosbox project. Dosemu is x86 linux only, but dosbox can run on any platform.

Re:A lame question, but...

[burns210]

use something like bochs, virtualPC, or wintel( a graphical bochs) to emulate an x86, and from there, you can get free(premade) freedos images to load right up. Pretty straight forward stuff :)

Not much of a tutorial

[Anonymous Coward]

I can do better.

Anonymous Coward's Guide to Dos Emulation on Linux:

1. Get dos emu.
2. Get dos games.

3. Install dos emu.
4. Run dos emu.

5. Install game.
6. Run game.

7. Profit.

Abandomware

[lintux]

Too bad that those games are all just available in ShareWare, there's (AFAIK) no way to get the full versions. Unless you pirate them, of course, but even for these old titles which aren't sold anymore, that's forbidden... :-(

Re:Abandomware

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm no.

You can still buy Quake, Doom, and Wolfenstein 3d from id software.

http://www.idsoftware.com/store/index.php?view=f ea tured&page=2

And it seems like you can still purchase scorched earth according to this official faq.

http://www.classicgaming.com/scorch/faq.html

I'm not sure how. Maybe you are provided a form when you download the shareware version?

Re:Abandomware

[TwistedSquare]

IIRC, Apogee sell all their old games online on their website www.3drealms.com -quick check- Yep, if you go here: http://store.yahoo.com/3drealms/dowit.html you can find classics such as Duke Nukem (1&2), Commander Keen (various episodes), and lesser known games such as the "cute" Cosmo, Crystal Caves, etc. Those were the days!

Re:It's a bit ironic... - Try VDMsound

[Artega VH]

May I suggest vdmsound Allowed me to play Dune 2 no problems under windows 2k. Bonus points for it being open source and gpl'ed eh?

Re:Now if only Windows could do the same thing, ri

[Pete]

I thought it rather amusing that all the classic old DOS games that the guy mentioned are in fact available as source ports for Linux (and probably most other OSs).

But in case you didn't know, you can get a very damn cool version of Scorched Earth in 3d here: http://www.scorched3d.co.uk/ (Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, source, etc.)

I played it with a bunch of friends at a LAN party recently, several of whom had played the DOS Scorched Earth before (I hadn't). Fan-fucking-tastic game. 'Twas a very satisfying moment when I was the first to discover that you could buy mini-nukes as weapons... *evil grin*

Guy who had just been hit with the nuke (along with everyone else who just heard the explosion): "WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT???!?!??!"

Pete. :-)

Re:Now if only Windows could do the same thing, ri

[Dave2 Wickham]

You already can, with a number of ports to Windows. See the 3DRealms forum on the Duke 3D source for a load of topics/links about the source release and ports (I don't have Duke3D and don't use Windows so I can't recommend one, and I know it was meant as a joke).

Maybe I can put that stack of floppies to use

[louzerr]

Haven't tried this yet - freedos is still in the process of compiling on my machine - but what the heck, I'll give it a shot.

Right now, I've got a huge box full of old floppies for Dune, ChessMaster, Wolfenstein, and a bunch of other old games that I spent way too much money on, considering all they can do now is collect dust.

Now if they only had an emulator for the Win95 games that no longer work in 2000/XP... Somebody aught to support these commercial products that no longer have an OS to run on!

Re:Maybe I can put that stack of floppies to use

[Artega VH]

I find with a bit of work those games tend to work fine in win2k at least.

There are utilities for CPU slowdown (such as CPU-Killer). For some games this doesn't work (Mechwarrior 1, works but the battle scenes are over in like 3 seconds flat... even running at 1% of my CPU speed.) It might be a good project to have on sourceforge if there already isn't one.

I do know that Dune 2 works fine, as does Prince of Persia. All the old Apogee games (keen, crystal caves, duke nukem ect) I have found all work fine with no slowdown.

Sound was a problem for me until I found VDMsound

Have fun ! :)

Re:Maybe I can put that stack of floppies to use

[Anonymous Coward]

Now if they only had an emulator for the Win95 games that no longer work in 2000/XP... Somebody aught to support these commercial products that no longer have an OS to run on! They do, its built into windows XP and 2K (requires a registry hack and SP3 in 2k) its called compatiblity mode. It allows you to convince the app your running win95, 98, 98se or NT 4. As for playing them on linux try winex

Gentoo users:

[Trejkaz]

Who needs a tutorial? Just type emerge dosemu.

Re:Gentoo users:

[TeknoHog]

The same goes for most distros - just use their own package management systems to install dosemu. The article covers nothing about the actual configuration, for example about getting sound to work.

Re:Gentoo users:

[Trejkaz]

I thought most distros wouldn't install freedos, but I might be wrong. Yeah, getting sound to work is a pain, which is why I use Dosbox instead... :-/

Dupe !

[Anonymous Coward]

That was posted 10 years ago, too late dude !

Attention, attention

[soccerisgod]

Gentlemen, start your "my precioussssss" jokes .. now!

Gee, what a great article.

[Anonymous Coward]

I sure am glad that someone wrote an article on how to play a bunch of games THAT HAVE NATIVE LINUX VERSIONS under dosemu for Linux. That sure is helpful!

What about the moral issues?

[Colonel Cholling]

For example, I used to run DR-DOS under DOSEMU. But it was owned by Caldera, which is now SCO. Can I run it with a clean conscience?

Re:What about the moral issues?

[Anonymous Coward]

The 3 main guys who were maintaining DRDOS bought DRDOS from the Canopy Group and split out on their own. I bought a licensed copy from them recently, for $30. While freedos is coming along, DRDOS is much better in many ways -- the task switcher which operates like virtual terminals in Linux, is extremely useful.

Re:What about the moral issues?

[moncyb]

Can I run it with a clean conscience?

Since you already bought it, then yes, but they will try to sue you for "trade secret violations." Then send out press releases saying you "stole" their code. ;-)

If you buy something (even if it was directly from Caldera), then later they start doing immoral things, I don't see any reason to throw it away. There was no way you'd know what the company would do in the future. You can't get the money back, and there isn't anything wrong with DRDOS, so just use it.

Though from the other post, it looks like DRDOS isn't owned by Umbrell^W the SCO people anymore, so I suppose there shouldn't be any moral problems with buying new copies too. Some may say you shouldn't reward those people who paid so much money to Canopy, but I don't know...depends upon how many levels deep you want to go with retribution. Be careful though, you may end up nuking the planet. ;-)

From one WP-5.1 user to another

[Anna Merikin]

Wp5.1 for DOS was, like all other WP DOS versions, was written in assembly language for "fast keyboard response" according to WP Corp. way back when.

I still use it on DOSemu (easy, start it with -c -k and all the function keys work as expected.)

Re:From one WP-5.1 user to another

[j-pimp]

Well as long as it was commented assembly language, their is value in the source. I assume symbol names and other debugging info was removed. Also Their would probally be documentation for the code somewhere.

Sorry, but ...

[Lord Grey]

... running a DOS program under Linux is like tying bricks to a dog's head.

Re:Sorry, but ...

[mark_lybarger]

something that's fun to do and watch? entertainment for the whole family? west virginia's favorite pastime? er just plain freaking kewl...

Re:Sorry, but ...

[Ziviyr]

You should try buttering the back of a cat and throwing it out a window sometime. :-)

It gets worse

[BiggerIsBetter]

I just ran WINE from bash, to launch the ReactOS cmd.exe, in order to run a Win32 CLI executed Assembler - that needs GUI output.

Yes, my head did hurt making that happen. It appears to be something to do with WINE's multiple parameter handling being dodgy.

Possible to get full VESA or 'x' video card?

[tzanger]

The reason I ask is for the old venerable OrCAD 386 SDT and PCB programs... 800x600 just doesn't cut it, and that old program is still way ahead of what they've put out today in terms of ease of use, functionality and keyboard support.

I know about Eagle's cross-platform abilities and all the other win32-only ones but to be honest, none of them seem to have that right mix of keyboard use, navigation and plain old workability. I'm rapidly running out of systems that OrCAD 386 will run on. :-(

Re:Possible to get full VESA or 'x' video card?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been running OrCAD SDT and PCB (386) versions under dosemu on a PIII 800 or so at 1024x768.

And you are right, when I got the demo disk for OrCAD Windows, I had a hard time believing how they could achieve such a large backwards step (a Windows application had to believe like Windows application, not tuned to the needs and convenience of the user, but to what Microsoft says in its guidelines, or some BS like that).

That is, besides the slowness which made a then almost state of the art Pentium 133 with a decent S3 PCI graphics look worse than an 8MHz AT under the 16 bit version...

Those were the times. For my schematics I also use gEDA but for PCB I'm still missing OrCAD and have found nothing approaching it in the open source world.

Re:Possible to get full VESA or 'x' video card?

[Anonymous Coward]

Please, somebody mod this way up. Only EEs and a few others who've been around in the area for 20+ years would understand the value of this comment.

Hey guys

[Anonymous Coward]

Doom, already runs fine in Linux and Windows.
Wolfenstein 3D, already runs fine in Linux and Windows.
Quake, already runs fine in Linux and Windows.
Duke Nukem 3D, already runs fun in Linux and Windows.
Rise of the Triad (I know you guys really want to play this one), already runs fun in Linux and Windows.
The source code for these games have already been released and ported. Use them. No emulators needed.
Anybody using dosemu or dosbox to play these games is an idiot.

Worthy uses of dos emulators: Cronologia, Fasttracker 2, Impulse Tracker, Commander Keen 4 (for now), Strife, Epic Pinball (well, at least the Android table, at least) if you like having your ball falling off the table or getting stuck in a bumper, and all other DOS programs whose source code will never be released by uninterested companies or ported because of the tedium from screwing around with ancient DOS assembly or pascal or 16bit C or whose source is lost forever or rotting on some floppy disks in a box in someone's basement.

Obligatory link

[Nuke Skyjumper]

Since the topic is emulating old DOS games, here is the obligatory link:

http://lord.nuklear.org

It's a large multiplayer Legend Of the Red Dragon game running under the linux DOS emulator

dosemu vs. dosbox

[Anonymous Coward]

dosemu uses the vm86 support provided by x86 kernels, so programs are ran by the processor directly (no cpu emulator used). you can also use your video card directly if you run dosemu in a vc. direct access is also a big problem, as the bios access doesn't work on every video card. you could run xdosemu, but the video card emulation is not mature. sound support in dosemu is quite immature.

at least with dosbox 0.60, dosbox is SLOW. epic pinball is playable, if you disable sound. even then, the game still flickers. want to run any protected mode program? don't bother, unless you want to try playing strife at 1 fps. but dosbox doesn't require a x86 process or direct video card access, so maybe in the future dosbox will be usable for the more recent and more demanding dos programs.

I am greatly saddened...

[tiger99]

Why? Because I gave away lots of my old but good DOS programs, complete with licence of course, years ago. It would be nice to run almost bug-free, stable things like Word Perfect 5.2 again. (I did find one bug in that actually, but it was not too serious and did not cause data loss). Then there was a magazine cover disk with 50 free utilities, about 20 of which were actually useful and worked, and got used every day, and all the old C programs I wrote, which would compile and run on both DOS and Unix, but not for some reason, Windoze, even in a command window.

It would be nice to run non-bloated code again. I used to be amazed at the speed of spell-checking in WP 5.2 on a 286, it would most probably still beat Word 2000 on my Athlon 2.6GHz. Life was much less troublesome then, before truly abominable software, designed by idiots, for idiots, became dominant.

Now, if DOS could be combined with Unix version 7, that would be almost perfection.

Re:I am greatly saddened...

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, if DOS could be combined with Unix version 7, that would be almost perfection.

Because it would be almost impossible for a regular user to install and/or use? -- no more user problems!

Re:Now if only Windows could do the same thing, ri

[lithron]

Almost completely legally? So you're saying its illegal, right?

My DosEmu Experience

[Anonymous Coward]

Well here was my experience installing it:

tar xzvf dosemu-1.1.99.1.tgz
cd dosemu-1.1.99.1/
make

ERROR:

In file included from /usr/include/linux/pci.h:20,
from /usr/include/sys/pci.h:23,
from ../../../src/include/pci.h:10,
from int.c:44:
/usr/include/linux/mod_devicetable.h:18: error: parse error before "__u32"
/usr/include/linux/mod_devicetable.h:20: error: parse error before "class"
/usr/include/linux/mod_devicetable.h:21: error: parse error before "driver_data"
/usr/include/linux/mod_devicetable.h:31: error: parse error before "__u32"
/usr/include/linux/mod_devicetable.h:33: error: parse error before "model_id"
/usr/include/linux/mod_devicetable.h:34: error: parse error before "specifier_id"
/usr/include/linux/mod_devicetable.h:35: error: parse error before "version"
/usr/include/linux/mod_devicetable.h:36: error: parse error before "driver_data"
/usr/include/linux/mod_devicetable.h:99: error: parse error before "__u16"
/usr/include/linux/mod_devicetable.h:103: error: parse error before "idProduct"
/usr/include/linux/mod_devicetable.h:104: error: parse error before "bcdDevice_lo"
/usr/include/linux/mod_devicetable.h:105: error: parse error before "bcdDevice_hi"
/usr/include/linux/mod_devicetable.h:108: error: parse error before "bDeviceClass"
/usr/include/linux/mod_devicetable.h:109: error: parse error before "bDeviceSubClass"
/usr/include/linux/mod_devicetable.h:110: error: parse error before "bDeviceProtocol"
/usr/include/linux/mod_devicetable.h:113: error: parse error before "bInterfaceClass"
/usr/include/linux/mod_devicetable.h:114: error: parse error before "bInterfaceSubClass"
/usr/include/linux/mod_devicetable.h:115: error: parse error before "bInterfaceProtocol"
/usr/include/linux/mod_devicetable.h:118: error: parse error before "driver_info"
/usr/include/linux/mod_devicetable.h:135: error: parse error before "__u16"
/usr/include/linux/mod_devicetable.h:138: error: parse error before "dev_type"
/usr/include/linux/mod_devicetable.h:139: error: parse error before "cu_model"
/usr/include/linux/mod_devicetable.h:140: error: parse error before "dev_model"
/usr/include/linux/mod_devicetable.h:142: error: parse error before "driver_info"


But its dealing with Matrox card (which I dont have) so I take it out... 20 files later:
Same error different file

Suddenly I remember:

apt-get install dosemu

1 minute later I am playing X-Com UFO defense! Yea!

Re:My DosEmu Experience

[Reinhard]

The problem lies in the linux 2.{5,6}.x kernel headers.
Try headers from a 2.4.x kernel.
If you know C, what do you think about the following code from mod_devicetable.h (what happens, if __KERNEL_ is undefined?):

#ifdef __KERNEL__
#include
typedef unsigned long kernel_ulong_t;
#endif

#define PCI_ANY_ID (~0)

struct pci_device_id {
__u32 vendor, device; /* Vendor and device ID or PCI_ANY_ID*/
__u32 subvendor, subdevice; /* Subsystem ID's or PCI_ANY_ID */
__u32 class, class_mask; /* (class,subclass,prog-if) triplet */
kernel_ulong_t driver_data; /* Data private to the driver */
};

dosemu 1.1.99.1 has many improvements compared to Debians 1.0.2 (e.g. sound, dpmi)
Reinhard

isn't WP8 a native port?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm running it on Libranet, works just fine. I thinK Cheapbytes still sells WP8 CDs.

On a serious note, MANY orgs and businesses still run Q&A DOS and ParadoxDOS for their mailing lists, reliability being their main attribute.

DOS apps don't run very well in Win98/2000/XP. They do run well under Linux.

Re:....and...

[odyrithm]

so you never played with dos debug then? ;) /me relives his old boot sector hacking days..

Yes!

[Anonymous Coward]

It had the nicest interface (especially with non-fixed fonts), and the most logical command structure of any word processor... nay of any computer program ever.

Most programs ignore all those control and alt key combinations, not Word Perfect! They use every one and thank god. You really felt like you got your money's worth out of a keyboard with WP5.1

Re:WP 5.1!!! that was KA in its time.

[hodet]

If you ported to Linux I would gladly download it too. Too bad it can never happen. WP5.1 helped me get through my final year in Universtity. I had upgraded the old C64 to a 286 and now had WP51/Lotus1-2-3/Harvard Graphics. It was amazing the quality layouts you can do on a paper as opposed to a typewriter which most of the other students used.

We even got a very crude overhead projector going. This thing was funny, you can hold it up and see write through it, and it would plug into the com port of the 286 which we hauled to the presentation, and lay it over top of a tranparency overhead projector. Ironic that I can't stomach Powerpoint or any or those presentation programs today. In hindsight that was probably the first ever "powerpoint" type presentation those folks ever saw. They wondered what the hell we were up to when we brought the equipment in.

Anyway, I digress again, my point was, I got it going under DOSEmu a while back and it works fine. I know some posters weren't too thrilled with this story but I appreciate these types of help webpages. While I did RTFM about a year or so ago and did the same thing, I of course did not take notes and would have to reinvent the wheel again. Not anymore with this site.

Bat Scripting?

[Anonymous Coward]

I assume this is some sort of shell scripting language or is it stuff like:

1) Flap wings
2) Ping with sonar
3) Get tangled in girls hair
4) Make guano
5) Go into cave
6) Hang from ceiling
7) Turn back into vampire
8) wait for night
etc etc

The article is lacking...

[Espectr0]

...about how to read a current "c:\" drive in your system so you can boot your already-installed games

Re:The article is lacking...

[Anonymous Coward]

In dosemu.conf, list /dev/hda1 as an hdimage

Re:Now if only Windows could do the same thing, ri

[Kent Recal]

No. He said it's partially illegal.

this was a troll on wednesday

[Anonymous Coward]

all we now is cygdos.

Two Questions

[Anonymous Coward]

1 - Why would anyone still want to use DOS applications?

2 - Why would anyone want to run Linux?

(Scratches head.)

Re:Two Questions

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm installing Windows95 in Bochs as we speak, so I can run SimCity 2000. I've tried it under latest Wine builds and it just doesn't work.

Mechwarrior 2

[Apreche]

If there is anyone who can succesfully emulate the DOS CD-ROM version of Mechwarrior 2, please tell me how you did it! I've tried every dos emulator in the universe. The only way I can make it work is to get an old PC and install a real version of DOS on it. I need to play this game bad, it's been so long...

DOS? you mean

[Anonymous Coward]

Denial of Service? aint that illegal?

ok, it's not a big deal to install it

[ammoQ]

But the information "You can use this without problems. It works. Try it. It runs your classic games." is valueable enough. I think I would not have tried this without this article. So I did, and yes, it works, and even my good old home-brew pacman works perfectly. Good old time.

Quake with no sound?

[Anonymous Coward]

Everytime I install dosemu I endup uninstalling it again. I can never get the sound to work ;(

Bollocks

[rs79]

WordStar, baby, WordStar.

Re:Bollocks

[Anonymous Coward]

Please be serious.... XyWrite III+

Easier way to get DOS running on a Linux box

[BigBlockMopar]

Here's my easier way to accomplish the same thing:

1. # shutdown -r now
2. Insert MS-DOS 6.22 Diskette #1
3. Follow instructions - partition, format, copy
4. Marvel at Microsoft's ability to sell a very crappy kludged-together set of interrupt routines as an "operating system"

turbo switch....

[Anonymous Coward]

Sad to say, have a turbo switch on my computer.... It's not hooked up, but it's there. :) ... DOSEMU... you can edit the dosemu.config file and set cpu emulation for 286, 386, 486 or 586, you can set hardrive, cdrom, soundcard, serial and lpt port access as well as the type of video. It's a very tweakable program, just read the docs. Just for fun, I have run ms-dos 3.2, 5.0, 6.22 and 7.0, dr-dos, IBM-dos. It will NOT run Win 3.1 and I flat out cannot get Commander Keen or Rise of the Triad to run. :(
Any, yes, I do have too much time on my hands!

Or.

[Inoshiro]

If you were playing games written for a 386-SX25 on a blazingly fast 486-75 (which slowed to 25), because their asm timing loops didn't take into account variable clock speed.

TANKWARS!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Scorch was for metrosexuals. Real geeks played tankwars! A tankwars screensaver would be really cool.

DOSBox

[fm6]

Very impressive bit of software. Runs VGA programs in a window, something Microsoft never figured out how to do. Does a great job of emulating old sound cards. But it's a bit scary to see it gobble up more than half the cycles on my 1 GHz machine when I'm playing Sword of the Samurai!

Now all I need is a CP/M emulator.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Now all I need is a CP/M emulator and I'm all set.

(Assuming the adhesive on any of those old floppies survived well enough to extract the contents.)

Re:Now all I need is a CP/M emulator.

[schwaang]

When I get all nostalgic for my old 8" floppy (drive) I visit the Online Software Museum.

[See "Boot CP/M!" link mid-page.]

Re:Now all I need is a CP/M emulator.

[SEE]

Bah, who needs a CP/M emulator when you already have DOSEmu?

DOSEmu can run CP/M-86 just fine. You can get the actual OS itself free and legal here, while this site explains how to run it under DOSEmu.

Also

[Johnny Mnemonic]

Also, here.

How about Windows itself?

[johannesg]

I mean, it will not be a real dos emu if you cannot type "win" to boot into at least Windows 3.11. And who knows, doing that might even be useful to some people.

Accesing ports?

[LinuxInDallas]

Does anyone know if it is possible to access the computers ports (ie serial and parallel) using these emulators? Anyone tried it with either dosemu or maybe even vmware?

Thanks

Re:Accesing ports?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, dosemu does support direct hardware access to the serial and parallel ports.

Privateer

[Mr Guy]

Screw Duke Nukem, will it play Origin's Privateer?

I keep a very 386 with a DOS boot disk just for Privateer which, as we all know, is officially the best game of all time ever.

Re:Privateer

[eugene ts wong]

I love that game. I have some info that might interest some people.

The funnest part was using that old beater ship that you get @ the beginning, & seeing if you can balance the power usage between the shields & the guns. I managed to finish the game with that ship. Part of the trick is using the torpedos to give you more fire power; they don't drain the generators.

Another fun thing to do is to set the invulnerability mode to on, & then smash into those big good guy ships. I can't remember which ship it was, but it definitely wasn't the freighters, & you had to do a head on collision. Neither of you get destroyed.

An interesting thing that you can do is communicate with other pilots to let them know that you are on their side. This only works with some pilots. I'll let you figure out which 1s, so that I won't spoil it for you.

Bug with 2.6.1 kernel + howto for Transport Tycoon

[linuxkrn]

I have had this running before but got it out today since it's been a while since I tried it.

Well, I ran into a problem with it crashing on my new kernel. It turns out the memory remap function doesn't auto detect like it should with kernel 2.6.1 and it would crash before even giving me a prompt. I found a fix by forcing mapping mode to "mapfile". I also included screenshots of Transport Tycoon running on it and my configs.

http://www.linuxlogin.com/games/dosemu.php

Needs more information...

[chaoskitty]

This article could have had more information. For starters, it could've compared the various DOS emulation environments and their features - like which actually do CPU level emulation, and which use the underlying x86...

Another thing: why is it that everyone assumes that every machine on which software will be run is a local machine running X? (Let's just forget for a moment that everyone assumes you're running GNU/Linux...) Personally, I'd like to find a way to run a DOS emulation via the command line - so people can ssh to my colocated server, start up a DOS environment, and use it from anywhere. Ideas?

It's hard enough getting people to download an ssh client. I don't think getting people to download, possibly buy, and install an X Server package is going to happen. Nor do I think it'd be reasonably quick enough...

Re:Needs more information...

[Anonymous Coward]

Dosemu does not require X. There are options in the config that refer to X, because some things like the keyboard mapping are done differently in X and not in X. If you are not using any graphics remotely, that's all fine. If you are, I don't think that when dosemu takes over the video card to display grpahics that the pretty pics will come accross the ssh connection.

If you have problems with getting people to even download ssh, try setting up a VNC server that has the VNC client in a java app accessible from the web. Then you can just give them a URL, and they can see graphics if that's what you want to do.

Finally..

[RoadkillBunny]

...I can play old DOS games. My Win2k partition just coun't do it.

BBS Games

[Tuffnut]

A while ago I wanted to run a couple BBS door games on my webserver and allow people to connect through telnet. I found this wasn't a very easy task.

Although I did find there is a very detailed guide on how to do it using Synchronet and as mentioned in this article DOSEMU.

DOS games I want to run (throttle?)

[Doctor Faustus]

Master of Magic: I expect this will probably work.

Quest for Glory: Some of the earlier ones might be fine, but Quest for Glory 4 was too fast to play once I upgraded my DOS PC from a 486DX-33 to a K6-266.

Xonix: This was a stupid little character based game, but I loved it, and it was too fast to play on a 286-16. I've seen newer versions, both for Palm OS and as Java applets, but none of them seem to work right.

Problem with sound and video.

[DigiShaman]

Even if I were to create a DOS boot CD with Duke3D installed (uncompressed). My problem would be with my soundcard. I think Duke3Ds legacy code is too old to support PCI cards. In fact, I'm not sure there is even a native DOS driver for my SB Live!. Then, there also might be an issue with my video card. I'm not sure the new AGP cards are extended VESA complient. Now days, AGP cards hold just enough data in video-BIOS to reflect the specification and timing of GPU and RAM...and other low level stuff. All other functions of the video card are kicked in only when a proper driver is installed. For example, just try and run a newer ATI or nVidia card in standard VGA mode in Windows. You will find that an old PCI S3 card does SVGA natively much MUCH faster due to full VESA compliance.

Re:Problem with sound and video.

[Anonymous Coward]

The SoundBlaster Live drivers for Windows 9x should come with native DOS drivers that configure the card to act like an SB16. Scrounge around for SBEINIT.COM on your driver disc or on the Internet.

This is really old

[Anonymous Coward]

How is this news? I was using this over 10 years ago in college. BTW fdisk did work...grin.

DOSEMU? ugh.

[IntergalacticWalrus]

Warning: What they failed to mention in this guide is that DOSEMU is SO DAMN SLOW. You need a very good CPU to play those old DOS games at a decent framerate. And BTW all of the games mentionned here have Linux ports, so what gives?

Re:DOSEMU? ugh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dosemu is not slow. It doesn't actually emulate much, most things go straight through to the processor (that's why you have to have an x86). Perhaps you are thinking of Bochs or dosbox or something ?

Re:DOSEMU? ugh.

[IntergalacticWalrus]

Well maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I installed dosemu on a Celeron 550 in order to run some QBasic stuff, and damn was it slow. I could see the text scrolling, and hell, nibbles actually worked without modifications, despite the classic "cpu too fast for the polling timer" issue that shows on at least a 300MHz system. I also tried running Hexen (DOOM engine game) and it was a slideshow, even though it normally takes only a 200MHz cpu to run it at full framerate (35fps).

My personal favorites (off the top of my head)

[CAIMLAS]

MechWarrior II: 21st Century Combat
Commander Keen
Scorched Earth/TANKS!
Hugo Whodunit (wish I could find a copy of those!)
Raptor: Call of the Shadows/Raptor 2
Descent
Duke Nukem 3D
Command and Conquer (Gold)
Warcraft I and II

Oher than the games listed above, I pretty much missed out on the DOS gaming era - I didn't get a Nintendo until '93 or so, and quite a while longer until I got a PC ('96?).

Re:My personal favorites (off the top of my head)

[Anonymous Coward]

Rise of the Triad !!

You forgot #5

[fm6]

5. Profit!

Seriously though, we all know that you can use boot a PC from an old MS-DOS diskette. But it's hardly the easiest way to do it. It means totally shutting down whatever you were doing. Some of us just want to take a break from serious computing for a few minutes. So being able to quickly fire up and shut down a game environment is darned handy. Even if you don't have a game-hating boss hanging over your shoulder!

F-keys and print preview working in WP5.1 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Last time I used dosemu, the F-keys in WP5.1 were messed up ( pressing F1 gave you F2, etc) and I never could get the print preview to work in the console; it would not reset the videocard BIOS so linux could use it after using print preview. Print preview would work in X ok.

Has anyone gotten these to work ? If so, could you reply to this post stating which DOS you use, which version of Dosemu and the dosemu.conf if possible, and which version of linux ?

I supported Xenix WP in 1986

[ashitaka]

One of the first clients I had was the Tokyo office of a large U.S. law firm. Their system was three Xenix servers connected to a world-wide leased-line network. All the secretaries and some lawyers had dumb serial terminals.

The word processor was WordPerfect with an early for of document management system. Very slick.

Now, almost 20 years later I actually had a secretary in my current firm call up and say "The Validate macro isn't working!"

Yes, although our main word processor is now Word, the bills are still done on good old WordPerfect for DOS 5.1 using over 200 macros which I have to support because I'm the only one old enough to know it. {whimper}

Dongles of Death

[ashitaka]

Our accounting package, which is an ancient thing running 70's RPG-II code under a System36 emulator, is the only application I have ever seen that will spawn a process that absolutely, positively cannot be killed by Windows 2000, not even using the Kill utility from the Resource Kit.

You have to hold down the power switch to force the machine off to clear the session if it hangs.

I would be *very* curious to see how this runs under DOSEMU especially as it requires a specific drive letter mapping.

Re:And if DOSemu doesn't work for some reason . .

[Reziac]

[plaintively] Is there a DOS emulator that runs on WinXP, and works better than XP's lame-assed console??

Re:Now if only Windows could do the same thing, ri

[Reziac]

Apparently my wish is your command prompt [g] I'd just asked if there was a WinXP version somewhere up above, THEN drilled down and found your post!

Anyway, how is it generally, compared to XP's lame console? My issue with that (aside from what apps it won't run) is that XP's console window makes everything textly so damned SLOW and herky-jerky -- apparently it's doing a text-to-graphics conversion, like those horrible old WYSIWYG emulators for DOS word processors. (Which made an 486 run like an XT.)

USB Support?

[nemesisj]

Does this setup let you run USB devices from the legacy DOS apps? IE, can you print to a USB printer from the emulated DOS?

I realize this question is a little contrived, but I've got a friend who's accounting software was written for DOS, and he's having trouble getting printer support under it. USB for DOS doesn't exist, so I'm wondering how the emulation handles device support.

Course, I could RTFM, but then what's slashdot for?

System/36

[KC Swan]

I use DOSemu to run Dongleware: a System/36 emulator. That's right, I'm emulating DOS under Linux so I can run software that emulates a S/36 under DOS.

We have a couple of legacy apps from our S/36 that work just fine. When we were ready to get rid of the S/36, I ported them over to the emulation product. We then installed the emulation product on a Linux box that blazes along on a 486DX-50. We plugged the dongle into the parallel port, and away we went.

There are three people that need to use the machine. As I was showing it to one of them, he entered the menu choice for a report he runs once a month. When the program finished less than a minute later, he informed me that it didn't work. I told him to go check the printer. That 486DX-50 runs our S/36 programs a couple orders of magnitude faster than the old 5360 with a B processer ever did.

A co-worker found a console telnet program that we use under Win9x, and we were able to get the odd key mappings the S/36 emulation expected. Under WinXP that program doesn't work right, and there are a couple places where we have to cancel a program because the graceful exit option doesn't work. But until I find a program that does what we need better than our old S/36 program, I see no need to migrate.

Re:System/36

[innocent_white_lamb]

We plugged the dongle into the parallel port, and away we went.

What happens when your dongle wears out, shorts out, or just plain quits working?

Re:System/36

[KC Swan]

My predecessor only knew how to program in RPG. When they needed to develop a PC based application for the field, she bought the S/36 emulators. I would have never done so. As it happens, I've got somewhere between six and ten dongles sitting on the shelf. In the meantime, replacing those apps in on my "one of these days" list.

Duke3D runs FAST on DOSEmu - and has for years

[Anonymous Coward]

Duke Nukem 3D runs fast enough to be playable on my old Pentium 2 400mhz laptop.

There is a setting that you max out - I forget what the exact name is, greedfactor or something similar. There is even IPX network lan play, though I haven't tried this...(ask on the mailing list).

Of course, this is mute, since now we can run Duke3D directly on Linux...

But yeah, Duke3D has run fine in linux for YEARS now in DOSEmu... ...and for some reason, DOSBox normally gets all of the attention...tsk tsk

Powerbasic compiler works under DOSEMU

[innocent_white_lamb]

Powerbasic DOS compiler apparently works just fine under DOSEMU.

Re:And if DOSemu doesn't work for some reason . .

[Anonymous Coward]

DOSbox works in Windows (all flavors, except 3.1). http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/download.php?main=1

Re:It's a bit ironic... - Try VDMsound

[DarkDust]

May I suggest vdmsound Allowed me to play Dune 2 no problems under windows 2k. Bonus points for it being open source and gpl'ed eh?

I've heard about it but it's of no use for me since I just have Windows ME on my laptop and VDMsound requires a NT-based Windows. And since I need to use Windows just two or three times a year I won't update to Windows 2k or XP because you know: never touch a running system :-)

Re:Now if only Windows could do the same thing, ri

[JKR]

You might be confusing two different things. XP has a real 32 bit console (cmd.exe), a bit like a bash shell. This is what programmers usually mean when they talk about console applications. However, this doesn't run 16-bit DOS programs. That is done by a virtual DOS machine, (ntvdm.exe) which emulates a real-mode 8086 with configurable memory, and some I think some protected mode hooks (but not enough to fool all DOS games). When you run command.com, you're actually starting an instance of ntvdm.exe and a console-like interface to it. It is horribly slow, because it's emulating DOS.

DOSBOX is closer to the command.com / ntvdm.exe view of the world, but does a better job of emulating DOS for games compatibility. (e.g. pretending that there's a SoundBlaster 16 at memory address 0x220). On the native side it uses the SDL layer for accelerated graphics & sound.

It's still slow, but it seems to be usable for all but the "latest" DOS games.

Jon.

Re:Now if only Windows could do the same thing, ri

[Reziac]

Yeah, am aware of XP's console and DOS VM, but my big argument with it isn't what DOS games it won't run, since I'm not really much of a gamer (tho it throws up on some DGJPP apps -- "unable to allocate DOS near pointers") but rather, what it does to the video in textmode apps. Text is so herky-jerky it's all but unusable, even apps that run like the wind on a 2MHz XT (List, WP5.1). It looks and behaves exactly like Screen Extender (SX) running on a 286, doing textmode-to-graphics mode translation on the fly. Which I presume is what it's actually doing, under the hood.

I suppose the whole thing is a side effect of NT's "No, you CAN'T touch the hardware", but cripes, on a P3, XP could at least get it as good as SX or Printmaster Gold on a 386 (the point where those apps' herky-jerky text-to-graphics becomes tolerably smooth, if you're not a real fast typist).

Anyway, I keep hoping to find something that produces a console window that's actually usable...

Re:Now if only Windows could do the same thing, ri

[JKR]

The trick is to not emulate DOS... there are so many nasty things you can do (like, printer drivers which drive the LPT ports directly; these memory accesses need to be intercepted and redirected to the print subsystem) that emulating them all is going to be slow, especially the emulated graphics.

XP's 16 bit subsystem does seem to be noticeably more jerky than earlier versions. Have you tried full screen mode instead of windowed?

Frankly, as a programmer I'd be happy for MS to drop the whole 16 bit real mode x86 compatibility crap. Is this what we have to look forward to with 64 bit machines?

Jon

Re:Now if only Windows could do the same thing, ri

[Reziac]

Yeah, I've tried fullscreen (tho that's often a PITA, when you're working back and forth among a bunch of windows) -- that's slightly better performance-wise, but it still does 800x600 instead of a true 640x480, so you get that weird 43 line screen font.

I've noticed XP's HAL is broken in a number of ways, while Win2K had none of these problems (including the herky-jerky console, and when I had Win2K, it was on a MUCH slower machine!) I have a suspicion that may be the root of the problem.

As a support tech, I'll give up DOS when they pry my cold dead computer from around it :) 16bit code may be ugly in today's world, but it still has its uses -- the problem being the tools have not been updated (since GUI-only types often don't grok the need), so there sometimes ARE no true replacements, or you have to install a 10mb package to get the functionality of a 30k utility.

And frankly, there is no reason not to update DOS itself to 32bit or beyond. EMM386 in DRDOS7 is 32bit and has been for 10 years. ConcurrentDOS v3 did multi-user 32bit in 1988. So it's not like it can't be done!

what?

[Anonymous Coward]

what?