On Mon, Feb 28, 2022 at 8:41 PM Sean Warner <[email protected]> wrote: > > Not sure if you saw my more recent post... I now have a version of FreeDOS > 1.2 with the NIC and MS Client installed and working. I went with v1.2 > because after some googling I read that 1.2 is more stable than 1.3 for > network sharing and things. Maybe that is not true anymore? > > At my work I use a DOS application. It is "installed" onto a network share on > a file server and by mapping this share as a network drive I and my > colleagues are able to run that DOS application in Windows 7 32-bit which we > are still using as our daily driver OSs on our work laptops. > > My IT dept wants to upgrade the OS of that file server and our laptops to Win > 10. So I am trying to find a new way to host that DOS applciation and make it > available to the two or three people who still use it, sometimes > simultaneously.
> My idea is to have Win 10 on my laptop and use Virtualbox to run FreeDOS > which would run this DOS application which would again need to be located on > a network share... or such is my understanding... in order that more than one > person can use it potentially at the same time as others using it or maybe > when no one else is around and their computers are turned off. I think you are making this far more complicated than it needs to be. Right now, you can access the DOS application and run it from a drive which is mapped as a network share. If the company upgrades the server OS on the machine mapped as a share, why would that change the mapping, or the ability to access the network share and the DOS application that lives on it? When you run it now, you are loading it from the network and running it locally. How many must use it simultaneously is irrelevant. You are each running a local copy of the application, that happens to be run from a network server instead of being loaded from a local drive. You are using 32 bit Win7 because it still supports NTVDM, which provides enough of the DOS environment to load and run a 18 bit DOS application. Microsoft removed the ability to run 16 bit applications in 64 bit Windows, so if you need to do that you need a VM of some sort to run them in. One possibility is a 32 bit build of Win10. Those do exist, and will still run 16 bit apps using NTVDM, but it isn't the direction I would go,. What happens if you need to run a 54 bit Windows application? These days, the preferred method of running 16 bit DOS applications on bit Windows is to use a VM, but it doesn't require VirtuaBox or the like. What most folks here do is run DOSBox or vDOS Plus. DOSBox is a VM designed to allow gamers to run DOS games on things that aren't DOS PCs. It provides enough of a DOS environment to run the games. and provides emulation for various graphics and sound functions that aren't available on things like PCs that don't have a Creative Labs Sound Blaster ISA card to provide the audio for games written to use it, or a specidfic supported video card for EGA/VGA modes.. DOSBox is cross platform. I used an ARM port to run several DOS apps on an Android tablet using an ARM Cortex 7 CPU. (I had to find one that passed Ctrl-key combos to the running app, as a WordStar style editor was one of the things I wanted to use.) If your application is pure character mode, you can use a fork of DOSBox called vDOS Plus. vDOS Plus only runs on x86 architecture, but that's not an issue for you. It's specifically intended to run character mode applications like editors and spreadsheets, and drops the specialized video and sound support.. I use it here to run the old VDE editor, a WordStar clone that originated under CP/M and was ported to DOS, as well as some character mode games ported from Unix like Larn and VMS Empire. I run them from a shortcut. The shortcut runs vDOS Plus, but starts it in the directory where the DOS program is stored. Local config files in the directory do the setup to run the program. Exit the program and I'm back in Windows. And for that matter, I don't see the need to host the DOS application your folks use on a network server. Does it ever *change*? Is there a reason you and your coworkers can't each have a local copy you run from your own PC, without needing to access a network share? You likely want a master copy on a network share as a backup, but I see no need to load and run if across the network. Tere may be specific things about the DOS app that will be problematic herfe, but right now it sounds like you are way overthinking the problem. ______ Dennis _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
