huh..you've complicated things. Get the sources for the megabuild (or my version, it has the same patches) and compile a native linux build. It contains support for linux direct lpt as well...

I am looking into source code and such for ubuntu, the only problem is i am very new to linux based o/s and and trying to learn how to compile things and get them to work of the machine. i did download the linux source code, but don't know what to do with it yet. I am doing this for my boss and he is hard headed and has convinced himself that this setup is even possible. I'm not sure that it even is. Thanks for the help though. I think i'm gonna get your code and play with that for a while.

Tell your boss he should upgrade his hw/sw after 20 years finally.
This is definitely NOT what dosbox is intended for, and even if it may
work in the end there's no guarantee for correctness.

You could try dosemu, qemu, bochs, & virtualbox.

I'm always amazed about how naive people can be. Running mission critical apps in an emulator designed for playing DOS games is just plain silly. For mission critical stuff i'd use one of the "large" PC emulators like VMWare (preferred) or VirtualBox.

Thanks for the input. That was about as helpful as when I asked my grandmother for insight on the same problem. If all i am going to get is help from one person here and snobby ass remarks from everyone else, you might as well kick me off. The program is good because it has very small files and can heal itself if and when there is a problem. Good luck finding that with anything windows based in the last ten years. This is the exact response I expected after reading hundreds of post here.

That was about as helpful as when I asked my grandmother for insight on the same problem.

Props to your grandmother 😀

a grandma that knows of virtualbox and can recommend it is cool in my books.

Your grandma is cool in my books then. I am just trying to find the best solution.

has anyone played with Lemon from linux? i've seen a bit of it and not sure if it is junk or not. That would be another solution. My boss is just so anti-Microsoft at this point.

There is alsoFreeDOS to try.

Are you sure there's no dongle driver setup or anything missing?

A lot of the older commercial applications used parallel dongles on the LPT and if the software is expecting that you'd really have some issues. I'm guessing since you had this setup on another PC you did check that?

I've done a fair bit of work with modern software from some of the bigger point of sale companies, and it's true that most of them are bloated crap. I can, in that regard, understand your boss.

I guess you boss has tons of data built up in the old app too? It's worth all your time to try and fix it? Something to think of..

You could just develop a small application on your own and used the saved time to play more games.. 😉

(I'm just trying out DosBox/FreeDOS myself, looks like fun!)