On 17 Aug 2024 at 3:27, Eric Auer via Freedos-user wrote: > > Even without the effort to create a network between QEMU > and the host Linux, have you considered using DOSEMU2? ;-) > > https://github.com/dosemu2/ > > For pre-compiled binary downloads for Ubuntu, > Fedora and OpenSuSE Linux, see the README here: > > https://github.com/dosemu2/dosemu2 > > DOSEMU2 makes it trivially easy to exchange files between > Linux and FreeDOS: It can use Linux directories as DOS > drive letters. > > Regards, Eric >
I kind of second that :-) DOSEMU has traditionally been "special". Different from e.g. QEMU in that DOSEMU was a relatively thin emulation layer. Not emulating what needed not be emulated. VGA in graphics modes was taken over and accessed directly. Which also meant that you had to deal with its HW compatibility, you sometimes had quirks when returning to Linxu console etc. But if it worked, you had a native VGA experience. You could reserve+assign a range of IO ports to DOSEMU, and prevent Linux from running its own device drivers on that device (such as a true hardware serial port). It could work on top of a directory as Eric says, or I recall I could give it a whole hard drive (block device) including the mbr and do a DOS fdisk/format/sys on that... It all worked without KVM or any modern virty stuff (VT-x, let alone VT-d). All it needed was Linux on a 386-class CPU. IIRC, at some point came x86_64 and Linux running in 64bit mode, which did away with some of the goodies that DOSEMU 1.4 relied upon. That is why 1.4 never ran in 64bit Linux, I hope I'm not kidding. That is also why DOSEMU 2 was forked. I figure that it's a thicker emulator, compared to 1.4. Haven't tried it yet... In the current docs, there are notes that DOSEMU can run a full VGA/SVGA emulation in Xwindows, or can run through SDL as an intermediate layer in the "console" (in a system without X). And how that emulation can prove different from a native HW VGA. Just wrapping the whole DOS environment in a proper modern VM such as QEMU or Virtualbox is much less work. But also much less sport and, possibly, fun, if this is your cup of tea :-) Frank _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
