4 ms·

Very interesting approach! I often hear people complain about how all programs in the old days were more efficient, but I never met anybody who actually lived u

by vog 9y ago

Very interesting approach! I often hear people complain about how all programs in the old days were more efficient, but I never met anybody who actually lived up to the logical conclusion. [1] > I run Win3.1 inside DOSBox Out of curiosity: What is the avantage of DOSBox compared to QEMU for your use case? > The keymap differences do take some getting used to when swapping between everyday things and WP though: F1->Escape, F3->F1, etc. Can't you just define different mappings in your virtualization tool? (DOSBox) [1] Except for large institutes like banks, air traffic control, etc. working with huge legacy systems, which is perhaps the other extreme.

shakna 9y ago
I've actually done a lot of work with legacy systems, maybe I'm a bit sentimental. > Out of curiosity: What is the avantage of DOSBox compared to QEMU for your use case? None, for the most part. DOSBox is a little better documented around things that might break. I chose DOSBox a few years back, because I still had my Windows 3.1 disks, but I didn't have any DOS disks anymore. Which gave me the option of Virtual Machine + FreeDOS, or Dosbox. And FreeDOS was very unstable at the time. I know lots of publishers for DOS-era software are gone, and so people do tend to choose to pirate if they want to get hold of that sort of thing, but I have and continue to contract to the government for very sensitive areas, so I always have to walk a legal tightrope. So, I can only use my old software. Thankfully, I've never thrown out my floppy disks. I imaged them all in about '02, being in a country that allows you to transfer your owned data into half a dozen different mediums as you see fit. I have actually been having some mounting issues with Dosbox recently, so I might think about tearing it down and building a VM with FreeDOS instead sometime soon. (Though thanks to DOS' super simple structure, that doesn't mean reinstalling everything from scratch). --- > Can't you just define different mappings in your virtualization tool? (DOSBox) You could. But it's just WordPerfect. They decided to ignore the standard, and go with a keymapping that made a little more sense, because of keyboard designs back then. However, I've got a couple dozen programs I use, and I'd rather not have WordPerfect with it's own keymapping and a restart to switch between it and the default. It isn't particularly onerous, just requires a bit of mental task switching. I've written two novels in WP, so the keymappings are ingrained, I just have to get into the "flow" of things before my mind stops hitting the wrong key.

by vog 9y ago

shakna 9y ago

I've actually done a lot of work with legacy systems, maybe I'm a bit sentimental. > Out of curiosity: What is the avantage of DOSBox compared to QEMU for your use case? None, for the most part. DOSBox is a little better documented around things that might break. I chose DOSBox a few years back, because I still had my Windows 3.1 disks, but I didn't have any DOS disks anymore. Which gave me the option of Virtual Machine + FreeDOS, or Dosbox. And FreeDOS was very unstable at the time. I know lots of publishers for DOS-era software are gone, and so people do tend to choose to pirate if they want to get hold of that sort of thing, but I have and continue to contract to the government for very sensitive areas, so I always have to walk a legal tightrope. So, I can only use my old software. Thankfully, I've never thrown out my floppy disks. I imaged them all in about '02, being in a country that allows you to transfer your owned data into half a dozen different mediums as you see fit. I have actually been having some mounting issues with Dosbox recently, so I might think about tearing it down and building a VM with FreeDOS instead sometime soon. (Though thanks to DOS' super simple structure, that doesn't mean reinstalling everything from scratch). --- > Can't you just define different mappings in your virtualization tool? (DOSBox) You could. But it's just WordPerfect. They decided to ignore the standard, and go with a keymapping that made a little more sense, because of keyboard designs back then. However, I've got a couple dozen programs I use, and I'd rather not have WordPerfect with it's own keymapping and a restart to switch between it and the default. It isn't particularly onerous, just requires a bit of mental task switching. I've written two novels in WP, so the keymappings are ingrained, I just have to get into the "flow" of things before my mind stops hitting the wrong key.