Emulating DOS in Linux in the year 2000 #DOScember

Welcome back to my first #doscember video where a bunch of YouTubers (see below) participate in a whole month worth of DOS specific video's.

In this video I'll be covering how we emulated a DOS environment on our Linux systems over 20 years ago using DosEmu. As I was already planning to do a Linux RedHat 4.1 video, I thought it would make a good fit for #doscember also.

Enjoy.....

#doscember official playlist:

#doscember Participating Channels:

#DOSCember #Linux #Emulation

[adriansdigitalbasement]

I'm impressed! I played with Linux back then but never this DOS in a Box stuff. Super cool!

[lwvmobile]

Next year, we definitely need to make "*Nix November" a thing

[JessicaFEREM]

0:25 "excuse the ocalhost login and the assword..." lmao

[PROSTOTabal]

Computer newbie: Is my computer year 2000 compilant?
RetroSpector78: Yes

[Spender]

Never heard of DosEmu before, but I'm quite impressed. I saw that it also was updated in 2012 with native 64-bit CPU support.

[osgrov]

Ahh, retro Linux machines makes me happy. :)
This was the era when I tried to get Linux running on every machine I came across. It really wasn't easy back then, but it was lots of fun trying.
Fun video. Not sure I ever played with dosemu, gonna have to look into it on some old machine. :)

[chainqk]

Oh, the memories... I was using OS/2 Warp at the time, but I was looking to move to Linux on the desktop, as soon as it "matures enough". (Spoiler alert: I never really moved to Linux on the desktop, I ended up with Macs, eventually.) One of the blocker issues to me was being DOSemu absolute horse**** compared to OS/2 Warp's DOS Task, which was really _the_ single best solution when it comes to combining multi-tasking with a high degree of DOS compatibility, and I was using a ton of DOS apps on it. Most of them just didn't work all that well with DOSemu.

Having said this, around 2002, I actually applied DOSemu in production. We were still running a bunch of DOS dBase III based "database" apps in production at the company where I was a sysadmin. This was across like 4 sites nationwide. On the largest site these were talking to a Netware 4 server, but some smaller sites had no server just a single computer running "standalone". No other computing infrastructure either, apart from a phone line. We normally drove to these sites every 2-3 months, retrieved the data, and made updates to the software. Then a new requirement came: we must be able to apply daily updates to these DOS apps and also download the data files daily from them, for data sync. Via a dial-in modem link, of course. So the programmers were in panic. But I solved this for them by customizing a Debian Linux install, to boot directly into console DOSemu, and then start the app via its AUTOEXEC.BAT. (Actually, this is how it was on the machine too, when it was running native DOS, it started the dBase app automagically on boot. So the users trained in using only this single app barely saw a difference.) Then - as this was before DSL times, and even ISDN was scarce on the countyside - I just configured pppd to accept incoming calls via an 56K modem, so you can literally chirp into the "Linux side" of the system, and download the data files you need, or update the app. I think I even made it possible via some scripts, to stop the running app, and start a new one over telnet(!) so the programmer could test their changes remotely. Then just restart the app on the local console. It worked really well, over 3 sites. Of course, shortly after I automated the downloading of data files too, via another Linux system, running on the main site, which just dialed in to the remote sides, and downloaded all the files via FTP, and slammed onto the Netware server. It was magic.

I gained really huge amount of respect points at the programmers after pulling this stunt. :) Those were the days...

[mke]

Okay, this is a freaking awesome video. This brings me back to running dosemu on RH6.2 on my Inspiron 7500. Thanks for sharing!

[keremizgol]

So that is basically like reverse of the WSL in Windows 10. Cool!

[proteque]

Interesting DOS environment. Never crossed my path. Such a cool lock back on older red hat as well. I did use 7.x at work for a few years around that time. Thanx for this great video!

[xXRedyzXx]

Seeing the binary finally compile I was cheering at my screen

[orinokonx]

I love that you use Stunts for 'benchmarking' this!

I have spent much time playing Stunts on various machines over the years to gauge their performance and compatibility. The wonderful soundtrack is permanently stuck in my brain :)

Also, I can't believe how functional this all was, even back then.

[dorinxtg]

Great video!
Just a small correction: Windows ME was also based on MSDOS, just like 98/95.

[SiDWiNDR]

Ah yes, I remember using Dosemu in RH5/SuSE6 to run Terminate and Termail to dial into BBSes and do Fidonet echomail/netmail. As Dosemu had a way to shell into Linux from inside DOS, I could append my Linux system's uptime into my messages :D

(Hi from Belgium btw - discovered your channel through Adrian's DOScember zoom stream)

[Qtechbh]

DosBox is perfectly capable of emulating Windows 3.11 and all dos games.
Biggest advantage over the others is out of the box sound support with the ability to adjust CPU speed and all the legacy hardware quirks required for legacy DOS games to run.
Biggest issue I've found with it so far is the lack of emulation for the networking hardware. It does support IPX, but not TCP/IP.
DosBox-x even goes further by supporting network emulation and even decent support for Windows 9x, however I've been struggling to get it stable even with 3.11 and its mouse support.
There is one crazy thing I'd love to try one day when I get the time. It has a build for DOS! In other words - you could boot in the host in FreeDOS and run DosBox-x inside as an emulator. This should allow you to have a setup with a bootable Windows 3.x/95 on something like an usb flash drive and it should work on any modern PC that can boot FreeDOS itself!

P.S. Why is there no Windows 95 in the history chart? It was much bigger jump from 3.x to 95 than from 95 to 98, yet it is not there. Also, no Windows NT? No OS/2?

[thereallantesh]

That case is absolutely enormous, and I love it!

[lukemyers]

Took me back in a wonderful way. Don't forget booting into DOS to get those soundcard drivers loaded then using loadlin to get to Linux :)

[dykodesigns]

My pentium 2 system has the same case but in 2003 I sacraligiously painted it silver with spray paint. The case has a few gripes though, the top cover must be removed in order to remove the side panels and it’s always a bit stuck. I guess the paintjob made it worse. My case has 4 5.25” bays and I’ve populated them all. I moved the 3.5” floppy to one of those bays as well for convenience / cable management reasons as it had to be close to the 5.25” floppy. The two top bays are used for cd-rom and the zip drive. I covered the hole for the 3.5” bay. My experience with Linux is that nothing ever works smoothly and compiling something always seems to fail even when following instructions. I wish BeOS had gotten it combined the simplicity of classic MacOS but with a powerfull foundation which was ahead of it’s time. BeOS, the OS that could have been big in a different parallel universe.

[jnrivers]

Source won't compile, no problem, I got this... 16 hours later, SUCCESS! Seriously though great video.

[trr]

DOSBox for Linux uses SDL, which was just starting to be worked on in 2000. It’s easy to forget what a game changer SDL was for Linux gaming.