

Dosemu2: a re-incarnation of Dosemu - galapago
http://stsp.github.io/dosemu2/

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skrowl
I'm not familiar with dosemu. How does it compare to dosbox, or just
installing dos on VirtualBox / etc?

Also, it appears to be 6 months since the last release of dosemu2. Is it
already abandoned?

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dfox
Dosbox does CPU emulation and all full-machine virtualization solutions have
to do the same for real mode code. Original dosemu on the other hand works in
mostly same way as DOS window/NTVDM in Windows/Windows NT.

i386 has support for essentially transparent switches between 16/32bit
protected modes and special mode in which it runs plain real mode code but
paging is active and privileged operations cause traps into kernel/hypervisor
(then usually called "VM manager" or such) these two features are designed to
support exactly this kind of backward-compatibility layers and were used both
for multitasking of DOS software (Windows, OS/2, DESQview, ...) as well as to
extend capabilities of DOS itself (various mechanisms for accessing more than
640KB RAM from real mode, DOS extenders, DPMI servers, hardware compatibility
layers (which did not work so well)). Most DOS software does not do anything
that cannot be emulated by combination of these two mechanisms and programs
that do such things are almost universally DOS based loaders for another
operating systems.

Problem with this whole thing is that this does not work on x86_64 with 64bit
kernel. (another thing is that any implementation of this mechanism is
invariably one big colossal mess of edge cases and ugly hacks, but it does
work and surprisingly reliably)

~~~
Chuck_G
Well, yes it does, at least on Ubuntu x64. (I'm using it now).

See:

[https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1328965](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1328965)

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dimitar
I remember using dosemu for some gamesabout 15 years ago on a slow computer.
It was much faster than dosbox. Nowadays it doesn't seem to matter. It was
also really easy to setup.

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atesti
Was development of the original dosemu stopped?

