You posted 1 day ago to a forum focused on gaming in DOSBox and are suprised you haven't received a glowing response.

Gimme a break.

I'm also wondering how you are going to get this approved on a goverment system especially since NIST still shows a vulnerability (even though it was fixed with a command line option) you'd still need to get the code analyzed for approval.

http://www.va.gov/TRM/ToolPage.asp?tid=7318#
http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vuln … d=CVE-2007-6328

Of course you may get lucky and just install it and hope that no one notices (it happens) or possibly get an exception via RBD.

XenaPortland wrote:

At this point I'm really considering pitching using an alternate emulator + Win XP. However, and this may be a barrier I can't get around, the end customer is a government agency who has pretty strict controls on what can be done to their systems (not to mention IT and security requirements). Any kind of virtualization software that requires some sort of major reconfiguring of the core system OS could be a non-starter. Hopefully there are options out there which don't violate the agencies policies in this way.

If I were you, I'd include in my pitch that the DOSBox homepage contains a picture of a Dune II character. It's a video game DOS emulator, and while it's very well developed, it's essentially a toy. That's what their mission critical data is currently running on.

Would you rather go with the Dune II guys or with Oracle (Virtualbox)?

Jorpho - You apparently have not read my posts. As I mentioned above, I need a system which carries forward support for the "COMIP" software which creates virtual com ports and a virtual modem that connects to remote sites via the internet. This software is ONLY available in Windows XP, and thus I need either (a) a system which passes through the COM ports created by COMIP (as DOSBox does) or (b) a system running WinXP in which this software can also be installed and run. Is there something about this you don't understand?

And what is it about offering to pay someone to modify a piece of software that you consider to be using a "magic stick"?

dada - That is a great point! Although I suspect DOSbox is probably used as much for non-game apps as it is for games. The moment Microsoft dropped support for DOS based apps this has become a much bigger problem for business than most people realize.

XenaPortland wrote:

Jorpho - You apparently have not read my posts. As I mentioned above, I need a system which carries forward support for the "COMIP" software which creates virtual com ports and a virtual modem that connects to remote sites via the internet. This software is ONLY available in Windows XP, and thus I need either (a) a system which passes through the COM ports created by COMIP (as DOSBox does) or (b) a system running WinXP in which this software can also be installed and run. Is there something about this you don't understand?

Apparently there is, as I can't see what makes DOSBox uniquely capable of this. What sort of serial port settings are you using in your DOSBox.conf?

In any case, if I am not mistaken, the serial port passthrough functionality of DOSBox is not lost once DOS is booted within DOSBox. I'm pretty sure VirtualBox also has the ability to pass data through from serial ports (virtual or otherwse) on the host to a program running in DOS within VirtualBox; it seems that it is even capable of fancier serial-over-TCP/IP communications, if http://technostuff.blogspot.ca/2008/10/piped- … virtualbox.html is any indication.

What scared me off DOS booting under DOSbox was the comment from your link that:

3. All the items taken for granted in native DOSBox, such as the mouse driver, auto configurations, must be replicated by the user within the disk images.

This strongly suggests to me that all core hardware support has to be "replicated by the user" within the MS-DOS boot image. I can't do that with the COMIP software (I was happily surprised that DOSbox faithfully emulated the completely virtual COM ports of COMIP using the "serialx=directserial realport:COMx" configuration).

Perhaps it was mentioned earlier, but another option is dosemu (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOSEMU) under linux. I don't know that it is suitable for business software, but it may also provide serial port emulation.

However, VirtualBox is a good choice given it supports the requested serial port emulation. It is best to test these software first and learn first-hand their compatibility with the business software.

A second non-emulation option is to buy a computer which supports the DOS operating system. Seems less expensive to buy a DOS computer than paying a third-party to possibly develop dosbox patches which may or may not work in the long-run.

Wasn't there some guy making an unofficial DOSBox all hacked up for business (printer patch, possibly dongle patch?, bunch of other patches) and ready to go? I forget what he called that. Maybe he can help this guy. All I remember is someone like truth5678 direct-linking the binary for it.... hmm...

Given the (non DOS related) problems that DOSBox has: limited FPU emulation (no exceptions), segment limits and various other things).
Unless that person has fixed those, I don't think that recommending any dosbox based "product" would be a good move

Agreed. 😀

XenaPortland wrote:

(I was happily surprised that DOSbox faithfully emulated the completely virtual COM ports of COMIP using the "serialx=directserial realport:COMx" configuration).

If that's what you're using, then as far as DOSBox is concerned, they might as well be real COM ports – and there is no reason to expect that other software would not likewise regard them as real COM ports. If DOSBox doesn't need Windows XP somehow, neither does anything else.

truth5678 wrote:

A second non-emulation option is to buy a computer which supports the DOS operating system. Seems less expensive to buy a DOS computer than paying a third-party to possibly develop dosbox patches which may or may not work in the long-run.

I was going to suggest the 32-bit version of Windows 7 (which is capable of running DOS programs without having to use XP Mode), but I'm not sure if something happened to serial port access there.

Trying booting MS-DOS in dosbox and test if it works, would have taken less time than discussing on this forum.

I completely agree with the idea that just keeping one computer running WinXP would totally solve this problem, and be far cheaper too than paying for all this custom development. However, the government organization has decided as a whole that EVERYONE must switch EVERYTHING to Windows 7, no exceptions. It's stupid, but there is nothing I can say or do that would convince them otherwise.

In fact, they ruled out using WinXP Mode under Windows 7 because Microsoft states on their website that they are officially dropping support for it in April, 2014. This seems silly when you consider DOSbox is an open source solution without any kind of official support. But I am very much boxed into a solution that will run on a Windows 7 machine using the COMIP software they already own and like.

In looking over the instructions for booting MS-DOS in DOSBox there are some problems there too. It needs a separate partition and, for that matter, a floppy drive in which to create the system from. None of their machines have floppy drives anymore and I have a dim chance of being able to talk their IT department into allowing me to create a new partition running a different OS on their computer.

I realize more than ever thanks to these posts that there are more options for virtualization than I realized. I'm currently in talks with the client over this, what I can and cannot consider, and I'm still hoping there is a fix for DOSbox which makes this whole issue moot.

XenaPortland wrote:

In looking over the instructions for booting MS-DOS in DOSBox there are some problems there too. It needs a separate partition and, for that matter, a floppy drive in which to create the system from. None of their machines have floppy drives anymore and I have a dim chance of being able to talk their IT department into allowing me to create a new partition running a different OS on their computer.

No. You do not need to create a separate partition, and you do not need a floppy drive to create the system from. You need to create a disk image – which exists as a perfectly normal file on the hard drive – and then you create a partition on the disk image; pretty much any virtualization software will work the same way. As for the system, all you need are the floppy disk images from somewhere – they're quite easy to find, and if you want to keep everything free and legal, you can just use FreeDOS.

In fact, if I'm not mistaken, you can just download the bootable hard disk image at download/file.php?id=9429 (which is linked to from this other thread which is not particularly relevant). Then all you need to do is copy your programs over to the disk image (using Disk Explorer or one of the other utlities discussed in that other thread) and boot it in DOSBox.

Hmm ... that does make sense. I was simply reading the instructions form your link: viewtopic.php?f=39&t=31838

Which implied you needed floppy disks with MSDOS on them (which I'm sure I have in box somewhere).

Hello everyone,

Although there has been some unkind snarkiness by a few posters, I have gotten some pretty great advice/help through this forum. I thought you might appreciate knowing what I decided to suggest to my client in order of preference:

1) Make some changes to the way the program is run under DOSbox which may fix the issue entirely (some great help was sent to me directly on this). This may also include some changes to the program itself to make it more compatible.
2) Try a different virtualization system (most likely VirtualBox + WinXP).
3) Simply use a WinXP machine for running this software system (recommended as the most reliable option, but unlikely to be customer approved).
4) Try booting MS-DOS (or FreeDOS) under DOSbox and seeing if the COM ports come through.
5) Take on the project of modifying DOSbox source code to fix the issue.

It will be interesting to see what the customer thinks and or wants to go with.

If what the client needs to run works in NTVDM, just get Windows Vista/7 x86. they still have NTVDM.