On 28 Jan 2021 at 21:42, Šimon Dobeš wrote: > > Well it's like this. > > For me it's too hard to orientate in command line interface such as > dos. For better orientation I prefer some sort of grafical user > interface (GUI) I do not know anything other except for Windows. It > is the best environment for me since when I was a child we had an > 486 > dx2 with windows 98 se on it. In this point my gaming career > started. > I played mostly dos games and some windows games such as a pinball > and so on. After 22 years I found several abandonware websites that > offer all that great games from my childhood. But there is one > problem. I just don't know how to use dos. So I want to use GUI when > I am running any of that games. Please note that I was 7 year old > boy > when dad brought the computer home. > > I also installed Linux Mint that comes with wine. I copied games > from > CD to run it and nothing happened. Even after trying to configure > wine. >
The Wine emulator caters for win32 applications. The win32 .EXE format (PE-COFF), while looking similar to a DOS .EXE on the outside, really needs a different set of OS services: the Win32 API. And this is what Wine emulates. DOS is deeper back in history. It has its own set of 16bit services and programming conventions, different from Win32 API (predating it). AFAIK Wine does not emulate a DOS environment for native 16bit DOS applications. But, not all is lost, you can get a DOS environment in Linux, even without modern heavy-weight and opaque virtualization. Which means, that you can have your apps in directories on your Linux filesystem, and run a "shim" or a DOS shell on top of those Linux native directories, and the DOS shell will feel like native DOS, and will run DOS programs, you can assign/map DOS drive letters to underlying Linux directories etc. There are two DOS emulators for Linux along those lines: DOSEMU and DosBox. You need to understand their configuration a bit, which may prove more difficult than installing DOS on bare metal and editing its autoexec.bat and config.sys :-) but these lightweight emulators then allow you to e.g. copy files or switch symlinks "underneath" the running DOS program at runtime. I've never tried this, but it might help you swap those install floppies by jumping out of the emulator for a moment, changing the contents of a floppy-emulating directory and then jumping right back into the DOS, without having to stop your DOS program. http://www.goodbyemicrosoft.net/news.php?item.828.8 http://www.dosemu.org/docs/README/1.4/ https://packages.debian.org/buster/dosbox https://www.dosbox.com/DOSBoxManual.html Or maybe something could be done about your problems installing Windows95 on bare metal. I remember trying to install Windows95 on a 486DX 120 MHz for the first time. I always gave up after maybe 20 minutes of the Windows installer doing apparently nothing. On about the 4th attempt, I got bored, got up from the computer and went to grab something to eat or what... I returned after an hour, and lo and behold, the installer was finished! I just had to be more patient, and stay away from that reset button. Obviously, as others have said, your chance of success depends on a number of things, such as exactly what your hardware is, in what condition it is (stability), if you need some drivers to get your disk controller and graphics to work and whatever. Back in the day, I got my hands dirty with Windows95 and 98 pretty often, and I've had a go with them during the noughties several times, on my job (many industrial PC's run obscure old operating systems and the one thing you do not need is an OS upgrade, even if your original hardware has died.) These were the toys of my later teenage youth. Apparently you can still buy new hardware that has full support for Windows98 and DOS: https://ipc2u.cz/catalog/ebox-3310a-h Unfortunately the audio output is not SoundBlaster-compatible, otherwise there are Windows98 drivers for almost all the components. Apparently it has a PS/2 MiniDIN for keyboard+mouse. The keyword here is "Vortex86DX" (not SX, not DX2). I also recall that there used to be notebooks with an onboard audio chip that was SB-compatible :-) but you'll have a hard time finding a 20 year old notebook nowadays. Feel free to contact me by direct e-mail if you'd appreciate help and you don't want to discuss this in public. BTW I'm Czech, you are possibly Slovak, so unless you'd like to exercise your English too (which is always a good idea!) we can take some shortcuts there as well... BTW - some further reading in Czech about DOS and Windows98 survival in modern times: http://rayer.g6.cz/os/os.htm http://windows98.xf.cz/ Frank _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
