Well, here goes my experience with Kolijoco's nice Symbian port of wonderful DosBox on Nokia N8.

Even though I had the luck to bring up the DosBox on N8 with the default dosbox.conf provided by the DosBox sourceforge package, I couldn't run(load) any sample application. To be specific, I tried to load the antique C/C++ complier - Turbo C++ 3.0 on DosBox emulator. I failed to load 🙁

Then after a bit of investigation, I thought of changing the CPU core type from dynamic to full. And it worked with a memsize of 11. After several attempts of tweaking the CPU core type and cycles, I found out that with CPU core type - full and cycles as large as 10000 was conducive to have the TC++ 3.0 up and running. The version of DosBox I used was 0.73(0) and of course all the necessary PIPS, STDIO server etc had been installed in advance. Using an USB-mouse, I could see the scroller functionality being smooth but couldn't see the mouse pointer when the TC++ IDE came up. So, I tried using an USB-keyboard and it was a nice experience though some keys failed to show up the characters they were meant for - something to do with the premapper.txt specifications if I am not wrong.

Okay. I have now moved on to boot any of the Windows operating systems - win95 and win98 as I could earlier on Nokia 5800 and Nokia N97 Mini with the DosBox. But, with the above setup(full CPU core and 10000 cycles), I am unable to reach beyond the initial boot command as the DosBox crashes at that point. And I tried redirecting the error on to a file and no luck in that as it just creates a file by the given name and dumps nothing in it - I guess this is due to the release version of DosBox I am using and not the debug one. So, is anyone aware of any debug version of DosBox for Symbian so that it would be possible to collect any useful information when needed and the boot process could be debugged on the phone itself?

First Approach(Through e:\data\dosbox.conf) :

1) Mounted the phone's memory card drive as an internal drive to DosBox.
2) Navigated to the folder having the win95 and win98 images.
3) Executed the command - boot w95.img and boot w98.img in separate attempts.
4) After the above step, DosBox crashes without leaving behind any clue about the
reason for the crash and it is also known to happen that the DosBox would exit
when an error occurs without any second thought - as claimed by itself.

Second Approach(Through e:\data\dosbox.conf) :

1) After mounting the memory card as an internal drive to DosBox, I mounted the
w95.img and w98.img as a virtual hard-drive internal to DosBox using the -t hdd
-fs fat options.
2) Navigated to the root level of the mounted virtual hard-drive.
3) Executed the setup batch file for w98 - _98.bat manually.
4) Thought it started, it gave the error message - Incorrect Dos Version
: as the DOS version in DosBox was older than that of Win98.
5) Then, with the same setup I tried to boot the win98 DOS kernel(1.44MB floppy
image) on the DosBox which was got from the internet. This succeeded on the
Desktop DosBox which gave the required DOS but failed to boot on DosBox on N8.
So, I was unable to get the correct version of DOS hence the manual execution of
the setup batch file for w98 also failed.

Summing it up, I was able to bring up the TC ++ 3.0 IDE and fiddle with it in compiling, debugging and executing a 16-bit application internal to DosBox on N8. But, I was unable to bring up either of the OSes - Windows 95 and Windows 98 on DosBox on N8 unlike on Nokia 5800 and Nokia N97 Mini.

Now, I would like to know if any of you people have had your luck in successfully booting either of Win95 or Win98 OSes on DosBox on N8 or any Symbian^3 phone for that matter. If yes, I would be glad to hear all of those interesting experiences - just for the sake of curiosity if not for any business logic 😀

Cheers.