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..
pcemu-x64
So while it may not look all that exciting, it actually works!
fdisk on pcemu-x64
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….
Can it do something dosemu,dosbox or qemu don't ?
ST506 5MB, huh? My very first hard drive was ST506 10MB. It had Soviet connectors, which were physically different from the original one (similar to IDE connectors), but electrically nearly the same. I just needed one invertor to get it going with the IBM controller.
Actually it does a lot *LESS* then dosbox/qemu.. Although it'd run over the horrific NT telnet/serial lines of the old days…
This would have been cool around NT 3.1 days, but really pointless today…
But it's *VERY* small, compared to something like Qemu/DosBOX.
That is what I have looked for ! Something that can emulate DOS under 64-bit Windows only for a application runtime. Not everybody needs the whole OS emulation, for example running Turbo Pascal – I need only an old application working. This is not pointless !
You may find that DOSBox better suits your needs.. Its cool in that you can edit the source in any 'modern' editor, and compile away with Turbo Pascal from back in the day…..
Virtual PC can do it too, but yeah, it's a little "top" heavy having to load MS-DOS and all that jazz (setting up the network redir etc etc)..
There also is that Japanese program: http://homepage3.nifty.com/takeda-toshiya/msdos/index.html
this may be more along the lines of what you want… 🙂
Thank you very much
Glad it could help you in what ever way that would be… although I cannot imagine it being much of a helping thing.. DOSBox may be more of what you are seeking.