On Sun, May 3, 2020 at 4:28 PM Vincent Asaro <carrotfi...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Eric, > > Thank you for the detailed response! I never played video games, actually, > I'm just nostalgic for the text interface experience and I really want to use > WordPerfect again but without installing a VM. As long as I can enter code > and also load DOS programs via USB, I'll get tons of mileage out of FD - > there are several legacy word processors I also want to try, like Electric > Pencil. A weird obsession, I know, but I'm a writer ;) Thanks again!
It depends on what you consider a VM. There is an open source cross-platform package called DOSbox, intended to let folks play old DOS games on things that *aren't* DOS PCs. A fork called vDOS is specifically intended for supporting DOS character mode productivity applications, but it is X86 specific. I use the vDOSPlus fork of vDOS to run an assortment of old DOS programs here under Win10. In my case, I run the VDE editor, which is a WordStar clone that originated under CP/M and was subsequently moved to DOS (though I have successfully run WS7 as well.), and a few old DOS character mode games, like DOS versions of Unix Larn and VMS Empire. Word Perfect runs as well, and there's a fan site with details on running it under vDOS here: http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/vdoswp.html (I have also gotten them running on an Android tablet using an Android port of DOSBox. The problem there was finding an Android port of DOSBox that passed ctrl-key combos through to the application, which as an absolute necessity for running a WordStar style editor.) DOSBox and VDOSPlus implement enough of DOS to run DOS applications but you'll want to add things. In particular, the provided shell you talk to at a command line is a subset of COMMAND.COM providing just enough to let you type in the name of a program to run. For anythi8nhg beyond that, you'll want to install FreeDOS command or 4DOS which is also available for FreeDOS. Running DOS apps here with vDOSPlus is a matter of a shortcut that runs the vDOSPlus program, and runs it *in* the directory where the DOS app lives. vDOS looks for autoexec.txt and config.txt files which are the equivalent of autoexec.bat and config.sys and perform the same functions and you run the program from auatexec.. You can find vDOSPlus here: https://www.vDosPlus.org If you want to run FreeDOS "on the bare metal", so to speak, your hardware looks more than adequate, assuming you can install from USB. Where did you find a runnable version of Electric Pencil? > ~ Vincent ______ Dennis _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
