Maybe this will help, eventually, https://github.com/tkchia/biefircate

Does DOSBox not work? If the programs are text-only you can also try MS-DOS Player.

cloverskull wrote on 2022-06-15, 02:28:

Ah, yeah, these are DOS 16 bit programs. Old BBS doors like Legend of the Red Dragon and Tradewars 2002.

What about OS/2? It was popular among BBS sysops. 😀
There's some development going on in ArcaOS (ex BlueLion OS).
The goal is to make it run on UEFI, or so I heard.
And since OS/2 is 32-Bit, anyway, 32-Bit UEFI support seems logical.

https://www.arcanoae.com/uefi-support-in-arca … -february-2022/

Edit:

Plasma wrote on 2022-06-15, 02:50:

Does DOSBox not work? If the programs are text-only you can also try MS-DOS Player.

I second that! 😁

I used to use that player to use ARC on Windows 7 x64.

Because, ARC was such an old archiver with an obscure compression,
that my mail hoster and the one of a friend, wasn't able to scan the archive.
That was the only way to send a friend an EXE file!
MS-DOS Player made that task very easy.

DOSBox would have needed a huge Cycle number to archive the same in a short time.

DOSBox is great but has one limitation: multinode/multiplayer games won't work due to the way DOSBox works with the filesystem.

I've used dosemu2 in linux to decent effect but it also has a lot of problems with various games. It's pretty imperfect though I'm happy the project has actual ongoing development.

I appreciate the recommendation to try MS-DOS Player, I'll give that a shot 😀 But I'm still back at square one where I have a UEFI-only machine that is stuck with a measly 4gigs of RAM. Installing Windows 7 would be far and away my preference.

ArcaOS seems interesting, I'll give that a look. Very intriguing. I never got into OS/2 back in the day so have very limited experience, but this sounds like a cool thing to explore 😀 Thanks.

cloverskull wrote on 2022-06-15, 05:49:

DOSBox is great but has one limitation: multinode/multiplayer games won't work due to the way DOSBox works with the filesystem.

Maybe ask the dosbox-x devs? They seem pretty responsive to problems like these.

cloverskull wrote on 2022-06-15, 05:49:

I appreciate the recommendation to try MS-DOS Player, I'll give that a shot 😀 But I'm still back at square one where I have a UEFI-only machine that is stuck with a measly 4gigs of RAM. Installing Windows 7 would be far and away my preference.

Msdos player works fine on windows 7.

I won't need msdos player if I use win7 32 bit, which is precisely the reason I created this thread 😀

cloverskull wrote on 2022-06-15, 16:15:

I won't need msdos player if I use win7 32 bit, which is precisely the reason I created this thread 😀

I think you should try WinXP on VMware, I remember it working quite fine on my 4gb ram Windows 10 PC.