Tell us what you are trying to accomplish, not how you think it could be done.

I am trying to run a MS-DOS BBS program in multi-node... Need a seperate instance of DOSBox running for each node. And they will be sharing the same files on the hard disk..
I will be obtaining the source code to this BBS program soon, so I will be able to make modifications to the system if neccasary to make it work in DOSBox or another suitable dos emu.

Wouldn't multi-node work fine if running MS-DOS on an HD image in DosBox?

Wouldnt the HD image be "in use" by the first instance not allowing the 2nd instance to access it?

I was thinking of just hosting the BBS on one image and allowing multiple connections to the guest, but I want to say official DosBox only supports one network connection so unless you add in TCP/IP support or you want to use more emulated modem in DosBox then you may be out of luck. (I'm not sure DosBox can support 2 modems at the same time).

Best person to ask about all of this is HAL 9000. I believe he wrote a socket inheritance patch for DosBox and he's also an expert with serial/network support in DosBox.

Well I am not worried about the TCP/IP part of it. The BBS already works for single-node, meaning only one person can use it at a time. That worked out of the box actually on the download. Just had to set the com port to modem and specify the listenport.. Works well except my telnet client on mac thinks the telnet mode is line by line instead of character by character. A simple mode command fixes this, and other telnet clients dont seem to do it. (Like Windows telnet.exe)..

But the problem is I need to run a seperate instance for each node I want to run simultaneously. In other words, if I want 5 people to be able to log into the BBS simultaneously, I need 5 instances of DOSBox to be running. A lone this works, just make a seperate conf file for each node, and make sure each listenport is different for each node. That part is no problem. But the problem is there are files on the "C:\" that all 5 of those nodes would need access to simultaneously. And I know the virtual drive (mapping drive to a path) doesnt work... And I didnt think that HD images would work either but am not sure about that.

I thought maybe somehow someone may have overcome this with a patch, maybe somehow calling the "refresh drive cache" from within your program, or just using something other then DOSBox.

Thanks,

Neofree

Wow, five seperate instances of DosBox? heh. Wonder how CPU intensive Door games are....

Yeah if they were run under one OS in the same DosBox session then there wouldn't be an issue.

Have you thought of using QEMU with Windows 98 and just running the BBS under that?

It would be nice if DosBox had more network support but it's geared more for home user gaming and not hosting gaming servers. Although hosting BBS Door games is a gaming function and should be supported by DosBox if we want to have a fully complete DOS gaming emulator. 😀

I don't want to think about the nightmare of trying to ensure that 5 seperate DosBox sessions on can write to the same files across at least three different operating systems (Linux/OSX/Win32)....

Well if I want to limit myself to Windows...then i dont even need DOSBox.. program works without it in Windows XP. But my "dedicated" 24/7 internet machine is a Mac... And seriously I would not even own a Windows box if I could.. I really want to focus on multi-platform. And without porting this old MS-DOS program to a modern multi-platform language, I am stuck with something like DOSBox... I read that a floppy drive can be accessed by multiple DOXBox instances properly.. But that's a very limited amount of space. And would slow down your app.. And would be noisey. But some type of sync routines might make that work.. Still pretty sloppy really. Is there a way to share memory or anything?

It's probably impossible to have 5 instances of the game running in one DOSBox instance? Additional COM ports (if you need more than 4) could be added easily.

Impossible? No, probably not. I could probably run Desqview or something. Actually, it's a BBS program, which would inculde doors too, but an entire BBS system as well. The problem is I want other people to be able to use the system easily in a dos emu. Like I said, I'm obtaining the source, so I will be releasing new versions of the software. I would like people to easily be able to run a multi-line system on modern operating systems. It's looking like I will be limited to Windows, however.