Define original system, average application, normal application and average game when it comes to DOS programs from the 80's to the late 90's and all of the tons of hardware they would run on.

There are already 5 quadrillion threads about it but the best reason is If something does a little bit of everything then more than likely it will suck at everything.

Name one emulator that is close to DOSBox compatibility. There is only one other one and most people don't use it for DOS gaming and when they do they are still discovering bugs. The people that spout off VPC,VirtualBox,Vmware,QEMU for DOS gaming only care about a handful of games.

When developer(s) program they have specific goals on what to emulate and what to optimize depending on the emulator's intended target. Almost all virtualization and emulation programs are intended for applications. What I want to know is why don't people stop pestering DOSBox for not supporting applications instead of annoying all the other emulator developers on not supporting applications properly. Most likely they are ignoring these requests since there is no money in it. A home user should move their data out of DBASE,Wordperfect, Wordstar, etc. A company should do the same with their proprietary applications and data. Windows 95+ has been around for 24 years so there is no excuse.

keenmaster486 wrote:

Out of curiosity, what is the actual difference between an emulator intended to run games and one intended to run traditional applications? Why wouldn't they be the same thing? Isn't it in the best interest of both targets to create an emulator that matches the original system as closely as possible?

1) Good emulation of specific hardware (especially sound cards) vs a full implementation of MS-DOS.
2) No, games don't need full DOS, a word processor doesn't need AWE32 support.
3) Interests of who? The people make DOSBOX make it because they wanted to play games. The writers of FreeDOS wanted to run business software. Supporting things that don't support your goals is not in your interests, given the amount of work involved.