Hi!
Initially I tried Bochs, but found Bochs either cannot go full screen using SDL2, or I just haven't found the magical incantation...
A quick google says "try alt-enter" (to go full screen). In 2011, this had the side-effect of risking to switch to a resolution DOS dislikes, I have not googled further to check whether Bochs in 2024 has issues?
More research showed DOSEMU out of date and not available on Void Linux
I agree regarding the first part, but have never heard of Void Linux.
distribution here, and/or requiring other self compiled libraries, as well as DOSEMU2 requiring additional self compiled libraries, with only DOSBOX (intended for games) available on Void Linux.
For Ubuntu, you can simply add the PPA to your software manager, https://github.com/dosemu2/dosemu2 explains the details. They also have pre-compiled packages for Fedora and OpenSUSE. No manual compilation is needed for either of the 3 distros.
After more research, found Jim Hall's book tends to sway towards suggesting Qemu, a virtualizer rather than an Emulator. I have and currently use Virtualbox here, but wanted to remain to the de facto used emulator for DOS environments. Regardless, Qemu readily resizes to full screen, so that I can finally see and read the font/characters.
I doubt that there is a "de facto used emulator for DOS". Personally, I prefer dosemu2. Windows users often prefer dosbox. Various users also like to use software which emulates or virtualizes a complete PC on which you then install DOS, but I have no idea why that would be better than dosbox or dosemu2 which spezicalize on supporting DOS and offer nice magic like "any Linux DIRECTORY can become your C: DISK".
1) Jim Hall's FreeDOS qemu incantation likely needs some minimal updating, for those that desire to get-up and running quickly... $ qemu-system-x86_64 -name FreeDOS -machine pc-i440fx-4.2,accel=kvm,usb=off,dump-guest-core=off
etc. That is a very long command line indeed! An incantation :-o
2) Book or documentation should probably lead or advise users, the best (as of date) emulator or virtualizer per their intended use.
What if the DOS distro installer can be improved, so it no longer matters which emulator or virtualizer people use? ;-)
As they say, the more we keep something simple, the easier and more readily we get things done.
We could provide a disk image with pre-installed DOS. This would be convenient for users of virtual computers, because they do not need to worry about installing to actual disks when their disks are imaginary anyway :-) Regards, Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
