VOGONS


First post, by Serious Callers Only

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Anyone that tried installing ReactOS on dosbox? And if you did, could it be done on the normal filesystem without all that bootloading or does reactos insist on direct 'hardware access' to a image file? (kind of a tragic waste of a opportunity if it does).

I want to boot into a portable (emulation) wine replacement that doesn't need image files, doesn't need any low level, error prone hardware manipulation bull and has filesystem transparency dammit.

I'll gladly sacrifice compatibility with the few bad apps that want that direct hardware access for the much superior replacements that are the emulated virtual devices. Oh demon tools doesn't work on the fakewindows device? How tragic, let me just change the cd from cdemu outside here on linux, stuff like this.

Reply 3 of 5, by Serious Callers Only

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Can dosbox boot off a live cd?

ie:
imgmount d live.iso -t iso
boot -l d

edit: apparently not. No fun allowed i see.

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edit: also ReactOS bug report page is not encouraging. For example: "Later native NVIDIA graphics drivers fails to install" marked as a critical bug.

I guess it's too hard to expect nerds that would be interested in reimplementing windows as a OS to keep it simple and high level. It's true that wine is pretty intrinsically married to a posix environment so it's not super portable, but please, for the love of god, some of these emulators or virtual machines, just provide a completely false OS for it to run with passthrough devices and filesystem. Screw the apps that want to interact with the cd-rom speed directly, or write sectors to hard disk, or even those asshole games that 'load windows.dll to do something they shouldn't'. Fake everything and 88% of things will still work, and those that don't, most will be useless anyway.

Or at least do it like dosbox does with, one path of letting the installed OS do whatever with boot, another of taking direct control and providing a 'fake dos' that directly interfaces with host. I'd expected that ROS could be that 'fake windows'.

Last edited by Serious Callers Only on 2017-06-27, 18:01. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 4 of 5, by Jorpho

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If what you are proposing was easy to do, someone would have done it already. Never mind the "nerds that would be interested"; such a venture would attract considerable commercial interest.

Reply 5 of 5, by Serious Callers Only

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But is it harder to actually re-implement windows? Could it be done in parallel? I guess i'm just perplexed about how it's not obvious this is much more wanted than 'reimplement windows so native drivers install'.

I'm actually spoiled, since i can use wine, but still, a project like wine but targeting a emulator that doesn't care about hardware accuracy is something missing.

Sigh... i'm getting rantish. My apologies, it's obvious the answer is 'not yet, if ever'.