On Mon, Mar 14, 2022, 6:42 AM Liam Proven <lpro...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, 14 Mar 2022 at 06:17, Jim Hall <jh...@freedos.org> wrote: > > > > Another free alternative is QEMU, which should be available (and > probably already installed by default) in every major Linux distro. > > You said this in answer to me the other day. I meant to respond, but was > busy. > > So, I will now. > > I don't see them as being the same thing at all. > > QEMU is a VM. Sure you can run DOS but you can run any OS under a VM. > > The point of DOSemu is that it runs DOS like a program under Linux. > It's not a VM and it doesn't work like a VM. > > DOSemu doesn't need a virtual hard disk. It lets DOS apps access Linux > directories and read and write Linux files. It lets DOS access Linux > hardware: I know of people burning EPROMs using DOSemu. It starts with > useful Linux directories mapped as DOS drives. It can run in text mode > and output be piped to the Linux shell. > > It's a totally different beast and I don't see how a hypervisor -- any > hypervisor -- can replace it? How can a DOS VM do any of the things I > just suggested? >
DOSEMU *can definitely* boot FreeDOS (or any DOS) in a window like I've described, where it's a completely self-contained and installed DOS. That's exactly how I used to run DOSEMU in the DOSEMU "1.x" days. Used that way, it's the same as how I describe QEMU or VirtualBox or any other virtual machine system. (Although *installing* FreeDOS in VirtualBox was different than installing FreeDOS on hardware, because DOSEMU presented C: as already "partitioned" and "formatted" so you didn't use FDISK or FORMAT under DOSEMU.) There was some kind of "DOSEMU app" feature which sounds like what you're describing. You could run a pre-packaged DOS program like it was a Linux app. If I recall correctly, it required a lot of setup and a custom dosemu.conf file. But I never dug into that with DOSEMU. I only wanted to boot FreeDOS from inside my Linux system, and in those days we didn't have QEMU or VirtualBox or VMware. I used DOSEMU in plain "DOS in a box" mode. (The DOSEMU window ran with the title "DOS in a box.") Then, for a period of many years, no one maintained DOSEMU. So I switched to other "DOS in a box" systems. These days, I use QEMU and VirtualBox (certain use cases for each). I haven't used DOSEMU2 so I don't know if they've changed how DOSEMU works.
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