Rockbox Development > Feature Ideas

DOS Emulator

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LyTning94:
I know this has been discussed before, but is it in the realm of possibility (assuming it hasn't already been done) to port a DOS emulator (like DOSbox) to Rockbox?

I know DOSbox is written in C++, so it would be hard to use, but are there other DOS emulators written in C? And would it even be possible to do?

LambdaCalculus:
There's a small list of DOS emulators on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:DOS_emulators

And, as you can see, there are no other ones that will be feasible to port over. Not to mention the fact that you'd have to also find a way of offering keyboard and mouse control, which is utterly impossible when you have few buttons to work with on a DAP, and then there's the issue of speed: most of the supported Rockbox DAPs will never be able to handle emulating an x86.

So in short: no, it's not possible to do. There are too many brick walls that people will be smacking into.

sideral:
I wouldn't be quite so pessimistic, depending on which era of PC you want to emulate.

Wikipedia's list is missing various light-weight 8086 emulators, including pcemu (which includes a BIOS and boots FreeDOS AFAIR) and x86emu (often used for card-BIOS execution on non-x86 platforms). Even writing an 8086 emulator from scratch isn't exactly rocket science and has been done several times.

Furthermore, I'd guess that at least of some of our targets have more than enough horsepower to emulate a late-80s / early-90s DOS PC with, say, a 16 MHz 8086.

LyTning94:
Which version of PCemu would work on Rockbox? I found several different versions by different people, but can't find an official version anywhere (like pcemu.com).

And would the Sansa Fuze be able to emulate it?

sideral:
No version of PCemu will work on Rockbox out of the box. :)  But given that this program (according to its README file) managed to emulate an 8 MHz 80286 on a 40 MHz SPARCstation 10 in the mid-1990s, the Fuze's 200+ MHz ARM processor should be more than well-equipped to emulate an early-90s PC.

I have last used PCemu literally decades ago, and I haven't kept track of this project in between; I guess it has been long abandoned.  Last I checked, it was still distributed, along with several important patches, as part of the FreeBSD ports collection.

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