DOSBox
Need to run old DOS software?
One way to go is to use virtualization software (e.g. QEMU, Bochs or Parallels Desktop) and install MS-DOS or FreeDOS on it. However, it’s quite inconvenient because you have to find floppy images, create a virtual hard disk and install the OS. After I failed to get my hands on my old DOS floppies and Parallels Desktop refused to boot FreeDOS, I decided I needed to try something else.
And then I discovered DOSBox. DOSBox is several things at a time, in one neat package:
- a complete x86 processor emulator,
- a PC peripheral emulator, including many once-popular graphics and video cards,
- a complete PC BIOS implementation,
- a complete MS-DOS API implementation,
- an MS-DOS compatible shell and user commands.
Plus, DOSBox is open-source, and available on most of the major software-hardware platforms.
Its use is totally hassle-free. When you run the program a DOS window opens up. If you have DOS executables on your host system, just mount the directory. The command:
mount D /path/to/the/directory
will mount an arbitrary host directory onto the D: drive of the guest system. And there you go… Here is a screenshot of an educational program I developed in the mid-1990s, running in DOSBox on MacOS X Snow Leopard:
