Since the last time I reviewed it, the MS-DOS Player, by Takeda Toshiya has come a long way!. He’s fleshed out more of the MS-DOS emulation, and updated the CPU core.
I’ve now been able to run the Microsoft C 5.1 compiler under Windows 7:
MS-DOS Player running Microsoft C 5.1
Check it out!
The MS-DOS Player is similar in nature to DOSBox, except that it’s not interactive, but rather built for CLI batch based operation. The MS-DOS Player seems to have some 80286 capabilities, but it’s BIOS/DOS emulation doesn’t seem to have the protected mode interface to allow dos extenders to work.
It’s certainly great for people that still have ANCIENT cli based programs that you’d want to call & capture their output. This is a life saver for some of us that still rely on dbaseIII & some ancient i8085 micro controller.
*EDIT updates from the future
Well Looking back at this post, it really is a snapshot of life back in 2011. Since those many years later DPMI support was added, along with the ability to ‘bind’ old programs allowing you to have a ‘Win32/Win64’ native exe that’ll run the old program inside. This is incredibly valuable for ancient toolchains where the source was either lost, or never provided, but now you can run them! This saves things like the Nintendo toolchain, although you can cross build the compiler, and assembler as they are GNU standard, the linker is a special one that will output cartridge images. And now you can run the MS-DOS DPMI version under Win64. Awesome!