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."

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

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 [tldp.org] 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...

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.

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: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...

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: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!