Date: Mon, 01 Sep 1997 12:20:34 +0930 From: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> To: Stephen Milley <smilley@waterw.com> Cc: emulation@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Dos Emulation Message-ID: <199709010250.MAA00432@word.smith.net.au> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 30 Jul 1997 02:46:51 -0400." <1.5.4.32.19970730064651.0068f808@waterw.com>
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> I would like to contribute some work into allowing Dos executables to work > under FreeBSD. I have novice(but, not advanced) Dos knowledge, meaning that > I have made many programs in Dos, and know some of its limitations and I've > been under many compilers under that OS. However, I would like to strongly > support the FreeBBS software, whenever possible, and learn alot of things at > the same time. I am also good at reverse engineering, so I think I would be > a good programmer at doing Dos emulation, if that is what the FreeBSD > terminology calls it(I know it's called DOSEMU in Linux). Thanks, and e-mail > me if you think I am qualified for coding this. :-) Hi Stephen; sorry about the delay in getting back to you. We're naturally more than happy to have people interested in supporting DOS emulation on FreeBSD; regardless of your hacker studliness there's plenty of useful work that you can do. Discussion on this work mostly occurs on the FreeBSD emulation mailing list (emulation@freebsd.org), to which you should subscribe if you want to get involved. At the moment, the current state of the art is the 'doscmd' program, which is a part of FreeBSD-current. You will need to be running -current if you want to get heavily involved in this, and we'd be quite happy to help get you up to speed there. What sort of things would you like to work on? Just off the top of my head, the following need some attention : - doscmd's built-in DOS emulation isn't terribly wonderful; it falls far short of getting it "right" in many places, and needs an audit. - The video BIOS/interface code needs a serious rewrite; we need a modular design which allows either a tty-style interface using curses or an X window to be used, with appropriate VGA emulation, etc. - The network redirector is "OK" as far as it goes, but also falls far short of being perfect. - A packet-driver emulator would be very useful, so that DOS programs could interact with the network. I have code for the PCEMU emulator which provides a pseudo-interface on the BSD side of things which looks like a private network between the BSD system and the virtual DOS machine; this would be an excellent place to start. As well as this, documentation, installation procedures (getting started, etc.), or even just a functionality audit would be very useful. If you think you can, and want to, help with any of this, just get into it! Ask us questions, pester for details, whatever you need to get the job done. mike
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