No, not unless you wanted to spent a ton of hours coding re-creating the wheel to run it on a very small amount of supported hardware which would take far more time than it takes to code DOSBox itself.
The closest you'll likely ever get is this DosBox Distro - A LiveUSB made simple or similar.

What would be the point anyway?

cyclone3d wrote on 2022-08-09, 00:55:

What would be the point anyway?

Dos box os would be the point! 😀

Sounds like a wonderful idea.

But it does sound easier to just use/mod old operating systems instead of making a new old one though. So I can see where the “what would be the point” comes from 🤣

We have DOS and FreeDOS. DOSBox was never meant to be an OS of its own and I don't think there would be any benefit to it over the other two.

If it's for compatibility with old software on old hardware, then DOS already there, if there is compatibility with old software with new hardware, FreeDOS is already there (serviceable and inproving).

I also don't think that DOSBox itself can be turned into an OS. You'd have to write a completely new OS from the ground up with DOSBox level compatibility and probably you could reuse some of the code, but what comes out would be essentially a completely different thing than DOSBox.

Yeah, it would just be DOS then with maybe some sound card emulators thrown in.

RandomStranger wrote on 2022-08-09, 05:48:

We have DOS and FreeDOS. DOSBox was never meant to be an OS of its own and I don't think there would be any benefit to it over the other two.

If it's for compatibility with old software on old hardware, then DOS already there, if there is compatibility with old software with new hardware, FreeDOS is already there (serviceable and inproving).

I also don't think that DOSBox itself can be turned into an OS. You'd have to write a completely new OS from the ground up with DOSBox level compatibility and probably you could reuse some of the code, but what comes out would be essentially a completely different thing than DOSBox.

What comes out would be a hybrid of both old DOS, Free DOS and what ever Frankenstein parts of DOSBox you could manage to port over in a functioning state, in the end it wouldn't be any better than DOS or FreeDos and would likely take a long time to debug and get working correctly across hundreds of bits of hardware both old and new. ohh.. and then you also have to debug the thousands of bits of software for compatibility with the Franken OS ...

Honestly . .fuck that, way too much work for little to no pay off when we already have perfectly serviceable working DOS based Operating Systems already.

I agree with your assessment, why reinvent the wheel when we already have perfect wheels at home.

DOSBox is its own thing and should remain as such I dont get this thread at all or the desire for DOSBox to be more than it is already.

DOSBox could be ported to UEFI, maybe, just like DOOM..
UEFI is a (not so) miniature OS, kind of.
https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Doom_UEFI