Now you know I'm crazy. 😀

So I was thinking about how nice it would be to run games implemented in Java in a little portable install, so of course "Java in DosBox" is the first thing to come to mind. I hate installing Java in Windows, it's such a whiny little resource hog, always begging for attention and updates. Not to mention versioning, though they try to be backwards compatible. I think.

So it would be lovely to have "just java," probably an old version, in a virtual environment, minimal or no OS. All it really should need is disk IO and graphics IO for such an application, one would think.

Searching around, I do see jPortable and PortableJava that might work out, I haven't tried them yet. I also tried looking for a 16 bit implementation of Java - ha! Silly me.

I also found interesting potential answers like this

Linux gcj is capable of compiling java programs into executable code that runs without a VM. So you can use gcj on a linux machine to crosscompile and create a .EXE for DOS.

and this

YES!! Its known core java and having jdk only, you can run it.

But that second answer looks a little fishy, and all google says about core java is a book.

Anyone have any thoughts or tried anything like this? Any other avenues to success you can think of?