Rockbox Development > Feature Ideas
DOS emulator?
lolsack:
i know the performance wouldn't be great at all but it may be possible on some players :) so could it happen?
froggyman:
I am sure it would be possible for this to happen, but someone who wants this would have to put the time into porting a DOS OS, like FreeDOS, as it is under the GNU GPL (same as rockbox I believe. And FreeDOS is also all open source and written in C, so that helps a little as well.
Even with that being said there would be tons of work like coding and debugging that would need to be done. For example, FreeDOS is for standard computers and mostly likely takes advantages of things like malloc() (which rockbox has minimal support for). Another disadvantage would be that with command line OS's you need to type everything, which could be done with the "virtual keyboard" in rockbox, but take more time than normal.
AFAIK FreeDOS doesnt require alot of system resources (like memory or processing power), so it wouldnt run incredibly slow, so it might be usable.
But still someone has to be interested in this enough to want it done, believe it or not rockbox just doesn't have code monkeys laying around ready to be used to implement new features that users want. :)
lolsack:
--- Quote from: froggyman on September 27, 2009, 03:13:04 PM --- Another disadvantage would be that with command line OS's you need to type everything, which could be done with the "virtual keyboard" in rockbox, but take more time than normal.
--- End quote ---
What about making a gui?
gevaerts:
--- Quote from: froggyman on September 27, 2009, 03:13:04 PM ---I am sure it would be possible for this to happen, but someone who wants this would have to put the time into porting a DOS OS, like FreeDOS, as it is under the GNU GPL (same as rockbox I believe. And FreeDOS is also all open source and written in C, so that helps a little as well.
Even with that being said there would be tons of work like coding and debugging that would need to be done. For example, FreeDOS is for standard computers and mostly likely takes advantages of things like malloc() (which rockbox has minimal support for). Another disadvantage would be that with command line OS's you need to type everything, which could be done with the "virtual keyboard" in rockbox, but take more time than normal.
AFAIK FreeDOS doesnt require alot of system resources (like memory or processing power), so it wouldnt run incredibly slow, so it might be usable.
But still someone has to be interested in this enough to want it done, believe it or not rockbox just doesn't have code monkeys laying around ready to be used to implement new features that users want. :)
--- End quote ---
I suspect the goal would be more to have a DOS-era PC emulator (which includes DOS) than the ability to run a DOS port. As such, probably dosbox would be a better start than freedos, but unfortunately it's C++.
Anyway, if the main goal is to support games, I don't think the lack of a decent keyboard is a big problem (at least not more so than for the spectrum emulator)
CPU power is going to be a big problem though.
lolsack:
--- Quote from: gevaerts on September 27, 2009, 03:53:44 PM ---CPU power is going to be a big problem though.
--- End quote ---
im going to have to agree with you and when i have spare time i will look for some emulators written in C :)
EDIT: ive search and the only thing ive found is freeDOS but there may be other things i do not know about.
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