VOGONS


First post, by jbaguire

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Have searched forum after forum on this and pieced together information from 4 seperate forums to make some OLD accounting software work in DosBox, and we had trouble afterwards with two people in the same file in a database.

We fixed this by extracting MS-DOS ver. 6.22 contents into a folder in the same directory of the accounting software and running the SHARE.EXE in autoexec... here is the autoexec settings:

VER SET 6 22
MOUNT K K:\
MOUNT J J:\
J:
CD msdos622
SHARE.EXE
CD ..
APPLICATION.EXE

The K drive is the database and the J drive is the program. We have the extracted MS-DOS disk in a folder where the program is stored and at the beginning we change the version of dosbox to the correct one...6.22.
Now they are able to access the same database files.

This shows that changing the version of dosbox as well as pointing dosbox at SHARE.EXE, will allow you to run it for harder programs.

Reply 1 of 5, by Qbix

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Don't use dosbox for an accounting Program.
Period!

Water flows down the stream
How to ask questions the smart way!

Reply 2 of 5, by jbaguire

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This is the only program that will execute a DOS program without having to set up a virtual machine and runs at decent speed. Can you suggest anything that fits this criteria other than DosBox?

Besides, this accounting software is simple and will only tie my friend over for a month or so and is more stable on DosBox then on their windows server 2000 pc that is having many crashing problems, and has to backup data by tape, which is god-aweful slow.

I used accounting software as an example, since many people try and get non-gaming software to run in DosBox and Megabuild 6 was built for such a purpose.

Reply 3 of 5, by jbaguire

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I apolgize. i have posted in the wrong section on this forum. please remove as I don't know how to do so myself. For further support please go to DosBox section of forum

Reply 4 of 5, by Dominus

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Jbaguire, there is a difference between share.exe not spitting out an error and share.exe actually working. For the first one you can just grab fakeshare from my Windows 3.x Dosbox guide and use lock stock Dosbox.

BUT this is as unsafe as running share in megabuild. It's just makung share.exe think it works but if your program needs the functionality of share.exe it will run into problems, most likely resulting in data corruption.

So use a real VM for that stuff. Not dosbox

Windows 3.1x guide for DOSBox
60 seconds guide to DOSBox
DOSBox SVN snapshot for macOS (10.4-11.x ppc/intel 32/64bit) notarized for gatekeeper

Reply 5 of 5, by mr_bigmouth_502

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jbaguire wrote:

This is the only program that will execute a DOS program without having to set up a virtual machine and runs at decent speed. Can you suggest anything that fits this criteria other than DosBox?

Besides, this accounting software is simple and will only tie my friend over for a month or so and is more stable on DosBox then on their windows server 2000 pc that is having many crashing problems, and has to backup data by tape, which is god-aweful slow.

I used accounting software as an example, since many people try and get non-gaming software to run in DosBox and Megabuild 6 was built for such a purpose.

Setting up a VM isn't that hard. After installing Virtualbox and downloading the latest release of FreeDOS from http://www.freedos.org/download/ , I was able to get a DOS environment set up in minutes. Now, I haven't set it up for file sharing between the host and the VM, but I'm pretty sure it shouldn't be too hard to do.

EDIT: Well, what do you know, there's a guide on how to share folders with a DOS environment on Virtualbox. https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Sharing_files_with_DOS