Hi! Just to clarify:
I am *not* planning to transform a RPi into a standalone "DOS computer that talks". That was Eric's idea. A perfectly valid idea with possible practical applications, but outside of my specific interest.
Not transform. You run DOS in an emulator. Only the emulator runs on the RPi hardware, DOS does not. As Mateusz has shown with EMUBNS, you can tell an emulator that the virtual serial port has to be connected to something virtual. This can be, for example, a simulation of a speech synthesizer connected to that, not actually existing, serial port. The simulation uses a Linux software speech synthesizer, but it looks like a hardware one for the DOS inside the emulator and for DOS, it makes no difference on which hardware the emulator is physically is running. It may even be running on a phone.
Of course, using linux and virtual emulation to make a dos subsystem can work, and that's how dosemu works (well, now there's dosemu2, which I can't get to work), but again, those use emulation...
Yet that is what I actually meant. DOS in an emulator on a machine which runs a speech synthesizer software, while DOS thinks it is connected to a speech synthesizer hardware. The ORIGINAL suggestion was to turn the RPi into a HARDWARE simulation of a speech synthesizer. So you connect another computer to the serial port of the RPi and the RPi uses a collection of software to pretend that the RPi IS a speech synthesizer hardware. The other computer, which can be a computer physically capable of running DOS without needing an emulator, will not be able to tell the difference. As far as running dosemu2 on RPi, the maintainers of that software think it should be easy to compile for the RPi, but because they have no RPi, they cannot provide pre compiled binaries for the RPi. Having to compile dosemu2 oneself is a bit tedious, so maybe somebody could help us by compiling it and sharing the binaries with more people. A quick search for x86 single board computers suggests: - Normal computers in the smaller standard form factors Mini ITX, Nano ITX and Pico ITX - All-in-one single board computers such as the LattePanda family, ODROID H3, UDOO Bolt and similar http://docs.lattepanda.com/content/3rd_delta_edition/specification/ https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-h3/ https://www.makeuseof.com/5-best-x86-single-board-computers-in-2023/ However, I have significant doubts that such SBC with x86 processor still come with a DOS compatible BIOS. They may be limited to running UEFI compatible operating systems. Does anybody here have one of those? Can they run DOS?
a real shame, there's so much legacy software out there that could benefit from such a system, I'm honestly extremely surprised...
Modern computers simply have too much power, so you can just run DOS at full speed on emulators instead, even if those run on hardware which has nothing to do with DOS any more. Regards, Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
