Hi Frank,
I kind of second that :-) DOSEMU has traditionally been "special". Different from e.g. QEMU in that DOSEMU was a relatively thin emulation layer. Not emulating what needed not be emulated.
Note that current versions do emulate everything, even including the CPU, given how hardware has become less suitable for DOS over time. However, the emulation is a lot more tuned towards DOS than, for example in VMWare. You even get some virtual drivers for EMS, XMS and the mentioned "drives which are mapped to Linux directories". Those sometimes work based on shim drivers shipping with DOSEMU2, sometimes they even do not need you to load any drivers at all, which is why you can boot DOS from a Linux directory in DOSEMU2: The read-only mapping works with magic and you load a shim driver later to enable write access. This is one of the differences from classic DOSEMU: You did not need any drivers even for writing in classic DOSEMU, but you do in DOSEMU2. Such things change from time to time with little warning, so if your DOS config gets weird, you have to check what the config of the FreeDOS spin-off bundled with DOSEMU2 looks like at that moment and update your own config accordingly. Or just stick to the bundled one and enjoy the surprising features ;-) The DOSEMU2 FreeDOS uses their own command.com and a heavily updated and modified kernel integrated more closely with DOSEMU2, but you can use your own classic FreeDOS install if you prefer, even from a directory-based simulation of a drive. This differs from DOSBOX, where even DOS itself is a simulation unless you boot a diskimage in DOSBOX. I would NOT give either a raw actual block device. Sure, you could technically say the device can be used instead of a disk image, but you would have to tell Linux about the risk of competing access, which is a problem avoided by using dedicated disk IMAGES. The feature of letting a directory appear as a drive is very convenient in that sense, because competing access is no problem, plus you immediately see changes from Linux in DOS and vice versa. Such mapped drives are not FAT, but that rarely matters. Cheers, Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
