Back when Linux was all new and exciting, I used to run this program, called pcemu to run some basic text only MS-DOS programs. The thing was dosemu was cool, but just unstable as hell, and a put software emulator could always be controlled because it was ‘just another process’…

Now the thing about pcemu is that it was meant for X11, and it’d suck for those of us that actually used terminals… Ages ago I ‘fixed’ a lot of the X11 stuff to run over a terminal, but I never did get the scrolling correct.

So years later, trying to remember the programs that I ran circa 1994, I thought I’d dig out pcemu and see how it runs on ‘modern’ machines…

Much to my surprise, David Given & Michael Hope, have updated it somewhat, and included curses support!

So I took the curses portion, then used a little insight from the ‘bounce’ demo from the NT 3.1 SDK, along with this great example of how to work some of the features of the Win32 Console, along with a long night trying to get the timers working, and I’ve managed to produce a copy of pcemu that’ll run on Win32 & Win64…

Now of course I’m sure you’d be saying Why…. But remember the x64 platform has no native way to run MS-DOS, so even a simple text only emulator is a nice thing to have..

So while it may not look all that exciting, it actually works!

Even FDISK renders correctly!

For some reason pcemu had hard disk emulation, but it was disabled by default… So I re-enabled it, and configured it to emulate the ST506 5MB hard disk.. And it works great, other then you can’t boot from it… 😐

Other then that, yes it is totally pointless, but I have to admit, it was pretty cool the first time I saw it booting up.

For the 2 or 3 people that care, my work is currently here. I’ve built it for the x86, x64 & ia64….