Is It Possible To Emulate Dos?

[menace]

I see just about everything else has been emulated with this bad boy--could DOS be as well? or a like program (FREEdos for instance) Just curious--i have absolutley no knowledge of programming etc. but I'm hoping that amidst the flames someone will explain why or why not B)

 

[mithris]

Hi, this has been discussed over and over.
And you will probably be flamed for not searching the board before asking.

But the main problem with DOS is that it's a operating system. Ok, a poor operating system.
Nevertheless, that means that you have to emulate the hardware beneath it and let it run inside your simulated machine.
This is nothing impossible at all, but it would probably run very slow, since you would atleast have to emulate a 80286 CPU and some hardware around it.

And afaik the existing emulators for other systems is built to be accurate rather than fast, so porting one of those might not be easy.

---
mithris

 

[watzza_uppa]

Dos? Dos? Dos?!?

Surely you dont mean

C\>SHITSHITSHIT, That Kind of dos.
what do u want that for

 

[Horscht]

some old dos games, like System schock and stuff.

 

[mattmagoo]

wouldnt they rquire a higher spec than the GP32, ud only be able to play early DOS games

 

[watzza_uppa]

Dos Haz Gamez
all i get is white text

 

[mattmagoo]

-C:\WINDOWS\RUN

WINDOWS RUNNING

-C:\LINUX\RUN

WHY THE HELL DO YOU WANNA RUN LINUX

-C:\PROGRAM FILE\GAMEPARK\PCLINK.exe\run

BEHAVE!!

 

[Akuma no Houkon]

-C:\WINDOWS\RUN

WINDOWS RUNNING

Windows is running? It doesnt do that for me!

 

[mattmagoo]

windows does'nt "run" for anyone it crashes

anyway, i dont know what that was, i h8 MSDOS and that was a brief interpretation of what I remmember DOS being

Prob. not accurate at all

 

[Akuma no Houkon]

I love DOS, much better than windows, although UNIX is better than both, which makes LINUX the king...<insert idle musings here>

DOS is simple, effective, fast, and easy to use.

DOS was easy to program for, and the games made for it (Warcraft, StarCraft, Doom, Quake, COMMANDER KEEN!, etc...) are still regaurded as some of the best games ever made. And are without a doubt, legends in their genra. Most of the emulators for NES, SNES, GENESIS, etc... were and are in DOS (although recently some like ZSNES have made windows ports)

DOS had such a huge impact on computers that to this day we still use it in many things we do (even if its DOS emulators now and not real DOS).

 

[RockOut]

Starcraft is not made for DOS! I know this because I have been playing it for YEARS! The game came out in 1997, 4 years after DOS died! :angry:

 

[Akuma no Houkon]

Ah yeah I was thinking of a different game not starcraft.

DOS Died? I am sure you are mistaken, its still one of the most used OS's in the world. Every windows OS uses DOS. You notice that little black box that pops up when you hit a batch file? Thats DOS. Windows 95 was basicially a GUI on top of DOS. Even in Windows98 DOS was an integral part of the OS. Even today, if you want to fix your computer when windows goes awry, you use DOS. You want to format your harddrive? you use DOS, want TO INSTALL AN OS, you use DOS. The windows installers up until WinME were pure DOS installers.

Even commercial companies like NORTON still produce most of their apps in DOS. Like Norton Ghost, etc...

Hell it wasnt until about 2 years ago that ZSNES (the best emulator for SNES hands down) released a windows version, and they STILL make the DOS version.

DOS is far from dead.

 

[yaustar]

Wasnt Me XP 2000 and NT the Windows OS that actually does not have DOS? I sure taht they use a command prompt of Dos emu built in.

Back to the topic, the makers of DOSbox for the PC say that you need a reasonably fast coputer to actually emulate DOS (dont ask me why).

 

[Akuma no Houkon]

Wasnt Me XP 2000 and NT the Windows OS that actually does not have DOS? I sure taht they use a command prompt of Dos emu built in.

WinME and above were the first versions of windows to not use DOS as an intregal part of the OS. It still uses DOS occasionally but that is via a DOS emulator not true dos.

 

[Mosch]

....and it still bugs me.

Seriously, DOs is really nice if you know what you are doing. I grew up using DOS, and it is not hard, no matter what other people tell you.

Anyway, I don't see the point in DOS for GP32. You could not use it properly (no keyboard) and I severely doubt that any games would run. Remember, DOS is not a system. You are actually asking for a PC emulator, and there is not even an Amiga emulator (I want one though ).

 

[GPJosh]

I like dos more than windows. B)

 

[ColinR]

Dos didn't die in 1993. Windows 95 came out in ummm...1995. Many machines weren't up to running games on Windows (mine included). I set my Win95 machine up to boot up into Dos by default, and only used Win95 for running sensible apps like Word, and some DTP package I can't remember the name of right now that I used for writing up projects with in my final years at university. I still remember writing Forth apps on Windows 3.1. Forth ran at pretty low levels, and my coding wasn't so great at times - often causing the system to reset - running in Windows (even 3.1) prevented having to wait for the boot up process to complete.

Back then there were no games that were Windows 95 only. In my cd rack I have a few games (Ultim@te Race, Tomb Raider, and Wipeout) that didn't run on Windows 95, but did use the 3D accelerator I had at the time (Apocalypse 3Dx, anyone remember them? Real POS even for the time).

A few of the systems I work on have DOS on them and when it comes to patching up machines the patch guys always make a script that heavily relies on and runs in DOS even if the host OS is NT4.

 

[Razor-X]

DOS is great, and I love it. One thing which really ticks me off is the ignorance MANY people have for it. (i.e. C:\war\war.exe..... can't you just double click on an icon, isnt that faster?). DOS was great for its day, and still MANY DOS programs made by devvers are more complicated than Windows (yes XP included) apps. (Take for instance the network apps for DOS). Still *nix and BSD systems are god. I can't wait to have a Linux on the GP32, that would be awesome.

 

[Akuma no Houkon]

Even today if you want to do anything low level, more often then not you have to use DOS to do it because windows cannot self modify everything.

I grew up in DOS, I didnt install windows until 98 and then only reluctantly because by then all games required it. (although I used 3.1 on my highschool computers back in the day)

 

[Octavious]

he he i still have a comp with 3.1 on it... ahhhhh
anyways, red alert was a dos game...... I hope it could work, specially with the ram upgrade
the author of a ram upgradeable DOS for gp32 shoudl work with mash and they could make money, both!

ahh... dos games.....

~Octavious