One of my crowning achievements(?) was using DOSbox for actual work purposes.
In 2010-14 I worked at large retailer that still did almost half their development in RPG running on IBM iSeries.
Part of onboarding for new devs was this series of training software modules that went over the fundamentals of the RPG language. It was boring, but very thorough. It clearly had been purchased in the late 90s and kept in use since not much had really changed.
I think it was with Windows 8 that it finally stopped working. My supervisor, in charge of intern program, started stressing after none of the built-in compatibility options worked.
I immediately thought of DOSbox, and sure enough, it worked like a charm. For the next couple years I was there, one of the first things all new devs did was install DOSbox and it gave me a smile every time.
I have a DOSbox story as well. A customer requested an emergency change to some firmware that was built for an old 8051-based platform. We had a single instance of the compiler from [redacted] available on a PC that was left in a closet for a decade or so.
The compiler maker was still in business but wanted 15 years of extortion-level "retroactive support" payments to let us move the license to a newer machine, and I could hear the old one about to fail. Thankfully the protection scheme was the old type that locked the compiler to the MAC address of the host PC.
We copied the compiler over to a DOSbox instance and spoofed the MAC. Worked like a charm.
Good for an emergency, but I'd make sure to calmly move to an open 8051 compiler.
Because screw that awful vendor.
Why? Moving your project to another compiler for a one time change is creating needless work and potentially opening a new can of worms you don't want to deal with.
If you have something battle tested and you know it works then just stick with it especially that now you got the vendor out of the loop.
Porting was the backup plan but time was of the essence, so the hack worked. Validation of brand new object code would have been a huge pain. But yeah, I would Assume that Renewing the license would have killed the project.
Did this retailer start with an "O"? Ran into a similar situation myself
Shouldn't large enterprises requiring DOS go for a virtual machine instead?
Why? Performance reasons?
Can you tell me what RPG is? I assume a language that runs on mainframes??
Report Program Generator, an IBM language from 1959 designed as an alternative to using punch cards.
From a glance ... unlike COBOL which was invented in the same year, it does not seem to be widely hated - possibly it's even well-liked. But since it is a proprietary language exclusive to IBM it is quite unfamiliar outside their silo.
Whenever I see a DOS thread, I like to remind people of eXoDOS, one of the most impressive archival efforts of every DOS game ever. Complete with manual scans, extras, and all neatly sorted in a launcher.
Thanks for mentioning that. Didn't knew it existed, looks fantastic to keep as historical record before it is lost in the sands of time.
Thank you for this, been looking for Destruction Derby 2 and the one contained in this works like a charm, brings back some memories!
FTwebsite: "Get the Full Release via Torrent (638GB)"
Ouch!
PRO TIP: You could select in the torrent to only download the particular game you care about and work it out yourself, easy, just did it with Destruction Derby 2 and works great.
other weird thing about exoDOS is you don't download and run. there's a huge decompression process that takes at least a few hours and generates 999 gorillion files. use on disk would be more than 638 GB consequent to the decompress-and-create-a-gorilloin-files process. Then again what you can do, this is arguably smarter than just torrent out a gorillion tiny files
There's also a light version that gets things on demand. But it's really a DOS museum as an archive. I recommend the larger one
>Ouch!
Being a data hoarder can pay off.
86box is also great, especially for retro PC gaming support. I can run Windows 98 with a Pentium 233 MMX and Voodoo3 on relatively modest hardware. (AMD 7840HS)
https://86box.net
Also PCem, which is has a faster dynamic recompiler and supports a few more hardware configs afaik. But hasn't been updated in a couple of years.
There's also UniPCem, which I think is a fork/port of PCem, and more recently updated. But I haven't tried it.
86box is itself a fork of PCem.
I use that myself to rekindle my love affair with the Amstrad PC1512, with some enhancements, 128KB ram expansion, and a pair of 32MB hard disks.
For me I find "DOSBox Staging" works best. I prefer to do the config in a .conf file instead of GUI
It also has native Mac Apple Silicon build. I find something very satisfying with emulating DOS and Windows 95 on a very fast non-x86 machine.
I found DOSBox-ECE more stable than DOSBox-X. I believe they provide similar set of features.
EDIT: Oops, talked too soon. Apparently DOSBox-ECE has been EOLed :(
My experience with dosbox-x is similar. dosbox-staging is probably the most stable and it's still updated.
Thanks! DOSBox Staging also comes with better CRT emulation defaults which is a bonus.
I like the -X fork because it adds a basic GUI, and menus on the Mac.
It's too bad that DOSBox-X doesn't have the Chrous/Reverb feature found in Dosbox Staging. This was a feature of the Sound Blaster AWE64 sound card, and it really enhanced the sound of Adlib music, almost making it sound like a wavetable.
One feature of DOSBox-X I've come to really appreciate when reverse engineering is that you can toggle the debug log on and off. Additionally, it can display the current VGA palette in the main window.
DosBox-X runs really well out of the box on my Mac M1, and it has some built-in shaders that try to simulate curved CRT geometry that are pretty fun to play with.
Heads up though - it has some coloration/palette issues around using the built-in capture tool to record video, but this is specifically related to Macs.
I'm a big fan, have been using it for years to play games. It's got a GUI that covers most of the DOSBox config, save states, and can run things like Windows 3 and 95 without much fuss.
The fact that this has DOS host support is pretty wild to me…
Other than “because we can”, which is great, is there a use to that?
For example could you run DOS 7 apps on a DOS 5 host that way (taking slowdown and hardware needs into account)?
It relies on HX-DOS' Win32 support. But since DOSBox-X emulates hardware, which is still useful when the host doesn't have such hardware.
Someday, when everyone is trapped in some strange vr future, this will be used to allow them to relive the computing of the 80's and 90's.
Nice to see this. And it’s one emulator that Nintendo can’t kill, which is always a good thing.
Wow, I didn't know you can play old games with this. Very nice.
Sounds really promising. especially 3dfx emulation...
dosbox-x and dosbox-staging are great.
But for a less HLE approach, do check PCem out.