Hi Dave, Please explain that "obsolete peripheral communications device".
> 1)? Re write the application to use WATTCP or something similar. If it is open source, you can do that. > 2) Leave the application alone and modify the emulator > (like VMWare Player) to provide a bridge between the fixed > shared memory addresses and some sort of standard Windows > (or even Linux) interfaces. You cannot modify VMWare (closed source) but you can modify Bochs, Qemu and Dosemu. The latter is only available in Linux but it has a nice virtual hardware infrastructure. I once planned to "write a TI Pro PC" set of hardware for it but of course it is still a lot of work so I never got around doing it. The TI Pro has non standard COM ports and a high end 3 plane special 720x350 RGB graphics card. > Leaving the application alone has some benefits since it's > pretty complex, brittle and old. What exactly does that application do? > So option 1 is pretty obvious and I could run the app either with > FreeDOS booted directly on the hardware or booted on VMWare under > Linux or Windows. It makes a big difference whether you boot on hardware or VMWare. > Option 2 is what I'm trying to explore -- has anyone had experience with > this?? Does either VMWare or DOSEmu have capabilities in this area? Both do, but as -you- do not have the vmware source code, you cannot "help yourself and write hardware for vmware". You can write your own hardware for dosemu, bochs and qemu, though :-). > some sort of memory range which is shared between FreeDOS and the > emulator which would then communicate to the outside world? Look at the way the emulators support VGA graphics: DOS writes to the virtual VGA RAM and the emulator calculates what you would see on a real VGA and then shows that on your Linux or Windows desktop in an image :-). Note that VGA hardware is pretty complex so do not get scared when you fail to understand the VGA emulation engine sources. Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
