(That’s why Windows 95 has CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT. In addition to having its own EXE format separate from DOS and introducing The Registry, Windows 3.1x had protected mode drivers and various 32-bit subsystems, but it used DOS as its bootloader and legacy driver API. While it exposed a 16-bit, cooperatively multitasked API originally developed for an earlier version of Windows, Windows 3.1x pioneered many of the backwards-compatibility hacks that Windows 9x perfected. It’s really more like… an operating system that runs next to DOS, and sometimes asks DOS for a cup of sugar or whatever. Sure, it was closely tied to DOS, but it was definitely an operating system in its own right, and certainly not just “basically a DOS application.” The disk driver is especially significant, as it as a 32-bit protected mode driver that completely by passed DOS and BIOS function calls. The Windows 3.1 instance and the DOS virtual machines were pre-emptively multitasked.Īs for the Windows 3.1 machine, it provided virtual memory (including paging to disk), its own interrupt handler (and didn’t use DOS’s), it used its own drivers for disks, mouse, audio, printing, and networking (When available – it could also use DOS drivers if Windows drivers weren’t available). Sure, it started from DOS, but when you launched Windows, it would replace DOS with a 32-bit hypervisor that would run a virtual machine with a single instance of Windows 3.1, as well as DOS virtual machines for running DOS apps. Basically, everything that an operating system does, Windows 3.1 without using DOS, and handled many things that DOS couldn’t. It was an actual operating system, really, by any reasonable definition of the word. Windows 3.1 was basically a DOS application. If you want to run serious DOS applications within a DOS emulator, you’d better try dedicated emulators such as vDos and vDosPlus instead, which are designed to run DOS applications rather than games. Some enhanced DOSBox SVN Builds may support these features, and you may try these builds if you want or need such features, but they are not supported by the DOSBox Team. For example, features such as parallel ports, long filenames and Ctrl-Break emulations are never officially supported in DOSBox. The DOSBox project has a policy of not adding features that aren’t used by DOS games if they take significant effort to implement, are likely to be a source of bugs or portability problems, and/or impact performance. Non-gaming DOS applications are not the primary focus of DOSBox, even though most DOS applications might in fact work within DOSBox. From the DOSBox FAQ (emphasis mine):Īccording to its developers, DOSBox is focused on DOS games. They could have caused a major disturbance and potentially started a fire.I always understood it was because DOSBox was optimized for DOS gaming, and Windows 3.x suffered as a result. Imagine if someone had war dialed into the machine. I made sure to turn off the modem and did not bring it over to the new DOSBox setup. At some point it had been remotely operated through some kind of Norton remote control software. The old PC was still connected to a modem with a dedicated phone line. To this day, unless something drastic has changed, a billion $ company is running DOSBox in production (and I literally mean production).Īlso, a side note. The first few attempts caused some sirens and alarms to go off in the building, which was "exiting", but after fiddling with the emulation speed I managed to get it to work. My solution was to copy everything from the old HDD to a new computer, install DOSBox and configure the serial port. Previous upgrade attempts involved virtualization, but that did not work since the program ran too quickly on modern hardware. It was therefore decided that this PC should be replaced/upgrade if possible.Īfter investigating I learned it communicated with a PLC through the RS-232 interface and ran some special sauce software from a company that stopped existing in 1995. This machine had been chucking along since 1992 and now someone high up had been made aware that it could be a potential risk if this machine stopped working. They had an old IBM PC running IBM DOS which controlled a vital system at the beginning of their production line. Back in 2012 I worked at a large manufacturing company.
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