DR-DOS

[Tomasz Rola]

On Mon, Nov 20, 2017 at 03:35:07PM +0100, Liam Proven wrote:
> On 17 November 2017 at 19:02, Tomasz Rola <rtomek at ceti.pl> wrote:
> >
> > Please excuse me if my remark is unnecessary, but if I read you right,
> > you have:
> >
[...]
> > "Things" can escape from VMs. I have plenty of Xen warnings and bug
> > descriptions in my old mailboxes, chances are there will be more.
> 
> It's possible. I'm not working on Windows systems, so I don't have
> virus scanners in place.
> 
> >> All I need to do now is work out how to make the hard disk bootable,
> >> and I'm in business.
> >
> > Boot some other OS, (I am partial to GRML Linux, well packed with
> > rescue stuff and more - https://grml.org/ ); + fdisk, mark bootable?
> 
> Er, yes. Thanks. I _do_ know about managing DOS hard disks, thanks. :-)

Ah. Please forgive me for making remote allusions :-)

As of "things" mentioned above, my current understanding is, those may
be both active code (virri, worrmms etc), as well as Darth Vader's
hand reaching out from the inside of VM and manipulating bits of
memory on hosting machine. Chances are, I worry too much about this,
but I suppose Pentium does not make a good platform for running VMs,
only a cheap one (although it used to look like a decent one, but
today it is only cheap).

My current understanding is, emulators without JIT should be more
decent. They sometimes enable one to have a peek into running
"machine", which might be nice thing to have, too. And speedwise, they
should be much closer to the original ;-P

[...]
> FreeDOS is fine if you like it. For me, it is just a little too unlike
> the "real thing" for comfort. And as I'm interested in playing with
> some fairly extreme DOS stuff -- multitaskers (DESQview, etc.) and so
> on -- I want the highest level of compatibility I can achieve.

Well, owing to lack of time, I am so far from creating anything like
"my own" that any actual problem with more interesting stuff just does
not come into my mind (and I have close to zero knowledge about
Desqview, which I regret because it looks great on those pictures out
there). Most probably I will go with some frankensteinish solution
involving Dosemu or Dosbox, whichever could run assembler without a
flop, Emacs on native side for editing, thus hybrid
multitasking. FreeDOS, for me, is the advanced way to do it, but as
the developers keep improving it (prepackaged utils and stuff), so I
might actually go for it - laziness pays. But the main reason for me
to go there would be to play with assembler, rather than with other
software.

There are also MenuetOS and KolibriOS, which look like nice "couldbe"
multiplexers for Dosbox, but I am not sure (would have to find time to
research) if there is any possibility to run DOS programs under their
control (and I could not find explicit answer in few minutes).

-- 
Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com             **