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]

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.

What about making a gui?

[gevaerts]

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.

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]

CPU power is going to be a big problem though.

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.

[Llorean]

Wouldn't you want something more like DOSbox?

[lolsack]

erm dosbox is written in C++, and im pretty sure rockbox is in C soo..... that just won't work, you would have to rewrite the code and i can't do it because i have no clue how to script in C

[Llorean]

No, my point is there wouldn't be much point at all in running DOS or a DOS-like OS without an x86 emulator beneath it so you could run DOS software.

[lolsack]

uhh you made my brain hurt D: please make simpler

[AlexP]

DOS runs on x86 hardware - i.e. the type of chip architecture that is in your desktop PC.  The targets rockbox runs on are a variety of chip architectures (arm, coldfire, mips and sh) none of which are x86.  Therefore Llorean is suggesting that in order to be able to do anything useful at all with your "DOS environment" once you have it, you also need it to be a x86 emulator, i.e. something that can pretend to be a different type of hardware so that your programs run.  An operating system designed to run on x86 is not very useful.

Note that emulating hardware needs host hardware that is many times faster than that which it is trying to emulate.

erm dosbox is written in C++, and im pretty sure rockbox is in C soo..... that just won't work, you would have to rewrite the code and i can't do it because i have no clue how to script in C

If you find something in C, it will have to be heavily modified if not rewritten (in this case) to be able to run on Rockbox - just finding something in C doesn't mean it will in any way whatsoever work.

[lolsack]

oh... ok