Is It Possible To Emulate Dos?

[madmac]

The majority of great MSDOS games run in 640x480.

That beats my hopes down, to see a Dos emu on GP, scaling down is crap

but a dos emu should be much faster than "5Mhz", if an Atari ST Emu is possible? the ST was comparable to an 386SX, if I remember right.

My guess is about 16-32 Mhz. Remember ARM is RISC, RISC is good 4 emus.

 

[kknd_cf]

Anyway, Dos is now officially dying:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1558314,00.asp

Its not being worked on anymore, that doesnt mean its dying. And thats just one version.

People will ALWAYS need a small, low level OS to do the low level fixem up crap.

SNES and NES games havent been officially made in _MANY_ years, yet its still far from dead.

Some things will never die. (or atleast take a long ass time about it!)

good point just look around, there's so many good NES sites around! But you know the next generation of gamers, what are they gonna think of the NES. I can imagine us all old saying "When I was young I was playing on my NES not pissin about on the Matrix, it's bad for you meh".
Anyway...............Ye I loved DOS to I've got a computer that only runs DOS, lol couldn't even run a version of asteriods lol. The best thing was this pacman clone it had, my whoile family liked it for some reason. Man that computer was cool. I also remebr plkaying doom when I was a kids at my uncles.

 

[lizard808uk]

A friend of mine runs MS Dos 7 (the last release) on a 1.6GHz Mame machine (stuffed in the back of his arcade cabinet). Runs pretty sweet too. I doubt DOS would run at all on GP32 since even he's having trouble getting sound to work on modern day PCI cards through emulation - the thing demands legacy dammit

If you really bored, try MS-DOS for the Atari ST (Castaway) or the fMSX emulators; I think its version 4 for the Atari and 1.8 for the MSX. Anyway you'll get a dos prompt but little else since there's no keyboard support and the thing runs slower than a slow thing

I think having emulators like Sarien are awesome, since it emulates a game engine rather than the system its based on. This means speed, and instantly a range of games are playable.

EDIT: If someone did a port of Colonization or Civlization I'd be happy, but Atari own the rights (and a shedload of old DOS games) so I doubt it'll happen any time soon

 

[extarbags]

You know what might be a better way to go about this? Not a DOS emulator, but a version of DOS for the gamepark. DOS is infinitely portable, I bet it wouldn't even be all that hard to get it to run natively on the GP.

Not sure how many old DOS games would run though... you'd probably have to build in mechanisms to trick the OS into thinking that hardware is there when it isn't in order to get any appreciable percentage of software to run. But still.

As for not having a keyboard: you whippersnappers must not have used DOS much. It's extremely easy to set up a menu in config.sys that lets you choose programs to run using only the arrow and enter keys. You'd just load "GPDOS" onto an SMC, along with whatever programs you wanted to run, and pack in a config.sys file containing a menu to let you pick what games you wanted. Easy as pie.

 

[Mosch]

Easy as pie.

OK, then do it

 

[RockOut]

DOS is JUNK! It is insufficient for modern day computing needs. Do you know that with every windows OS comes the next step to the downfall of DOS. If it isn't dead already it will be in a few years because it too slow for today's computers. Windows 98 is the most popular OS because of fast loading times, and ease of use, so DOS is just obsolete. Even though it is currently integrated into almost every operating system, the amount of supported DOS code is decreasing in every new operating system. If you port DOS, when you use it, it will probably make your GP32 run slower and reduce the efficiency of the system. What I am just saying is that people should develop an operating system which is based on a more practical coding language like ASM or C++. gp32_console

 

[washo]

DOS WILL NEVER DIE :angry:

see you :lol:

 

[RockOut]

Evolution........... Evolution............

 

[extarbags]

DOS is JUNK! It is insufficient for modern day computing needs. Do you know that with every windows OS comes the next step to the downfall of DOS. If it isn't dead already it will be in a few years because it too slow for today's computers. Windows 98 is the most popular OS because of fast loading times, and ease of use, so DOS is just obsolete. Even though it is currently integrated into almost every operating system, the amount of supported DOS code is decreasing in every new operating system. If you port DOS, when you use it, it will probably make your GP32 run slower and reduce the efficiency of the system. What I am just saying is that people should develop an operating system which is based on a more practical coding language like ASM or C++. gp32_console

Dude, are you nuts? DOS is the fastest OS there is, period, because it doesn't actually do anything. Think about it. How long does it take your Win98 machine to boot? If it's longer than three seconds, it's slower than a DOS 6.1 box.

Also, the facts bout Windows and DOS, because there seems to be some confusion: Win9x is DOS. That's right... every version of Windows 95, 98, and Me were all DOS; the GUI isn't the OS, it's just a program that runs. Hence the option to boot to a straight DOS prompt.

All versions of Windows NT, however, are not based on DOS. This includes Windows NT 3.1 and 4.0, as well as Windows 2000 and XP. These OS's offer DOS emulation, but are not actually based in DOS, which is why not all DOS programs will run on them.

DOS has fallen out of favor because it lacks functionality... it requires drivers for almost every piece of hardware, it's hard to make programs run in the background, it has zero native support for networking, etc. That said, it is still quite viable as an OS for portable devices, because of exactly the thing you claim is its weak point: speed. Think about it... DOS doesn't actually do anything. All it does is provide you with a basic interface to the computer. You need a seperate program to do absolutely anything aside from manipulate the disks, or to use any piece of hardware that isn't absolutely required from the mouse and cd-rom drive on up. It does hardly anything... with that little overhead, how could it not be fast?

Furthermore: I don't see why you think a DOS port would make your GP slower and less efficient... again, DOS is about the most efficient OS there is.

And one other thing: "people should develop an operating system which is based on a more practical coding language like ASM or C++?" More practical than what? What do you think DOS is written in? Also, I think the developers of every single version of Unix ever would be quite interested in your theory that C++ is an ideal programming language for OS design.

I'm not sure if you're trolling or what, but seriously... you sound like a guy who's bashing DOS despite never having used it, and who's running off at the mouth about programming languages even though you've never done any programming. I mean, I could be wrong; maybe you used DOS for ten years and know five programming languages. But if that's the case, I have to ask you this: how did you get this far without learning a god damned thing about either one of them?

Edit: sorry if this post comes off a little too abrasive. It's not meant that way, honest. All in good fun