(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Downloaded, installed, many times, yet no success.
Nothing happens, I don't get a Z prompt.

Any idea?

Ben

There is a Dosbox-Dotpup.
See the thread for libraries needed:

http://www.murga.org/%7Epuppy/viewtopic.php?t=2941

Mark

"Can someone (or several someones) give a few examples of the DOS programs they would be able to run with an emulator? No hurry, just curious."

I still use foxpro 2.6. I suppose it would run on dosbox but it runs great on dosemu. Open Office now reads foxpro (dbase) files.

First thing in my head would be... QBASIC!!! I only messed with it for two months, but it was fun. Far superior to TI-83+ Basic, which is what I had been using off and on for several years prior to that. Then I did a little Basic4GL and C++, then moved into PHP for a bit. Now I've been doing Bash for a couple years.

freebasic is very similar (but more powerful) ... it was designed to be compatible with quickbasic syntax
http://www.freebasic.net/

As an "old schooler" I really enjoyed this discussion and thought I'd add a little. I still use DOS in my computer business for lots of jobs. For many diagnostic and low level task it is still the fastest & easiest way to get the job done. With a little imagination and some ingenuity you can get a lot out of even the most ancient hardware. I've worked for many years on a charity project that refurbrishes old computers and then donates them to non-profit organizations. Early in this project I assembled a drive image made up of freeware & shareware (now mostly abandonware) programs. It included a graphical desktop, file manager with file associations to open, view, and edit various data and graphic file formats. Word processor w/spellcheck, grahical desktop publishing, spreadsheet, database, image editing/ drawing program, image viewing/slide show program, hard drive backup, plus a text clipboard utility and screen capture program. It all ran under OpenDos and used OpenDos's task switching capability to allow you to load and run several applications at once and switch between them from a hot key menu. All of this fit into a compressed image of about 9mb. Hardware required for installation...minimum 286 w/4mb ram and 17mb free hard drive space (yeah that's 17 megabytes). I still keep it running on an old 386sx-33 machine as a demo.

"Can someone (or several someones) give a few examples of the DOS programs they would be able to run with an emulator? No hurry, just curious."

X-com, Ascendancy, Anacreon, VonBerg's List.... Almost everything else I can think of was ported forward. And X-com & Anacreon really need the "run it at only 20Mhz option".

freebasic is a disaster of a project, and becomes more like c everyday, to the point: if you are going to learn freebasic you might just as well learn c. the promises of being compatible with qbasic syntax are ancient and inaccurate. if it kept its promises, i would promote it.

instead, i promote warpbasic. there isn't much to it to promote at the moment, but i'm regularly in touch with the developer. the week it's ready, you will see demo's of it here, and if the dev doesn't make a dotpup, i will, with his help. i am capable of making a dotpup for freebasic, and mu made one, but he made one for 0.16 which is a disaster compared to 0.15, and the dotpup does not include the SMALL bits of the c compiler needed to make freebasic work. LASTLY: the freebasic for dos is the worst of them. in relative terms: no one cares about it, so no one maintains it.

for dosbox, try qbasic. it works, i've used it, i'll help you code in it. if you are not careful, qbasic can crash dosbox. lots of things can crash dosbox. i'll have to see if dosbox is more stable in puppy 1.07. but lately i'm not in it much.

i learned computers in dos. there are so many cool old programs for it, commander keen 4 (shareware, still available) is worth trying in dosbox, and numerous other things. however, MOST of the things that are useful in dos are more useful for real dos: file managers, scripts, quick utils... there are a few exceptions. if you're native to linux, you will find native linux tools. if you're native to dos, like me, you will love how dosbox tides you over and provides a "familiar face" while you get accustomed to linux. i still use qbasic, though, even in linux. sometimes it's that useful.

finally, this may change. freedos is a very cool project, and may lead to tools that are extremely useful, that linux equivilents of are not created instantly. you will want dosbox to try them. OTOH... if there is something you'd like to try in dosbox, tell me what it is. i have been using dos for more than 20 years, i love dos, and i will help point you to the right tool if i can. i think another good person to ask is bloodhound, in #puppylinux. if you see the link below, you will get some comparisons of puppylinux and dos commands, many of which work in dosbox. it is also possible to run dos 6.22 in qemu, and i think mu had a file for that somewhere, related to qemu.

I actually haven't run QB in a couple years. Basically, once I discovered Basic4GL my quest for basic ended. It's set up for using OpenGL very easily, though it also has a bunch of 2d sprite stuff built-in. I haven't used it much lately though, because I've been focusing more on helping Puppy.

Lately an effort has started to port it to linux, and it seems to be splitting off into it's own thing. The last version I tested worked in Puppy, but needed Glibc updated to 2.4.