DOSEMU and programming with PowerBASIC

[Tom Hanlin]

http://www.linuxandmain.com/modules....rticle&sid=363

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Tom Hanlin
PowerBASIC Staff

[Paul Purvis]

hi tom

Is that a recommendation on the right linux to use, as i am about to install
my first linux in a few days, i know yall have been more than likely playing around
with some different linux os, maybe you can save me some time about which way i should
be going. It really seams people such as myself are tired of windows and microsoft making
all kinds of changes to their operation systems and franky i am one of the ones feed up
with microsoft lowering my quality of life on unnecessary changes and obscruities.
i do not mind changes, but with the changes should be standardization and more reliablity, and simplicity.
for example like the registry, what a major mess. But i do understand people wanting jobs and
i believe jobs would be there without making a drastic change to operating systems. It is nice to be king
of the hill, but it would come as a welcome for a new Simon. Simon Says what next.
paul


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[Michael Torrie]

Dosemu works about the same under any distro. So pick your favorite and have fun. I personally use RedHat 9, but many prefer Mandrake 9.1. Both are good.

Not only does pb work fine under dosemu, but the standard vga graphics modes are all supported now, so you can "screen 12" and everything works (albeit in a small x-window on my 1600x1200 screen!). I found that even the various 256-color vga modes work too (320x200 screen 13h, 320x240,etc). I believe vesa is supported too.

I pulled out my disk of old sierra games and they worked complete with sound.

Anyway, a word to the wise, you'll want to run pb under xdosemu, not dosemu (which runs in a terminal vs it's own x-window). xdosemu has a build it mouse driver that pb picks up just fine. Also graphics are only supported under xdosemu (or dosemu on a real console, not an xterm). PB itself runs fine in an xterm/dosemu combo if you want no mouse and no graphics. In fact it's downright cool to be able to log in over ssh to my remote linux box and pull up a session of pb. That's something DOS never could do before, and even virtualization under windows never worked.

For those that are fearing the demise of the msdos-compatible dos box under windows, I'm sure dosemu will be ported to windows when needed to bridge this gap.

One final note of interest is that dosemu now has some rudimentary support for non-intel processors. In other words, it soon will let you boot DOS on a sparc and others, through cpu instruction emulation. Since this is extremely lightweight, I predict it will be much faster than bochs.

Michael


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[This message has been edited by Michael Torrie (edited August 03, 2003).]

[Karl Lessmann]

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[This message has been edited by Karl Lessmann (edited September 23, 2003).]

[Michael Torrie]

Briefly, with xdosemu, most standard graphic modes are simulated. This is essentially done by polling virtual graphics framebuffer and displaying it to the X window at a certain rate. However for games, you'll want to run dosemu in a virtual console (say ctrl-alt-F1) and have it load and use your real graphics card bios. Then the video modes aren't emulated, but are done on your real hardware.

I've had the following things running just fine in xdosemu, though: Space Quest III, Martian Memoradum (256-color game), generic cadd level 2 (hires 16 color vga), and several pb graphics programs. An example of a program that won't run in xdosemu but will run in dosemu on a virtual console with the real video bios (plus a utility to tweak vga modes) is Round42.

My point was mainly that if you're going to run dosemu from with your X11 environment, say Gnome or KDE, you'll want to use xdosemu so that you can have mouse and graphics support. If you don't need those, dosemu works fine in a normal terminal emulator like xterm. If you want to run dosemu on it's own virtual console because you need the video bios or whatever, then what I said about xdosemu doesn't apply.

There's no real equivalent in linux of a "maximized" or full-screen dos session in the same sense as Windows. You can either run dosemu in an xterm, an X window, or on a virtual console which would be the equivalent of your maxed DOS box, but you can't switch between windowed and fullscreen in the same sense as pressing alt-enter will do in a cmd box. You can switch back and forth between a dosemu session using a virtual console (and the video bios) and a X11 session running on another virtual console without any difficulties. I guess that's what you were asking. And yes, many dos games (at least any game that doesn't do weird vcpi protected mode stuff) can run on a virtual console in all video modes supported by your hardware, including vesa modes.

Michael

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[This message has been edited by Michael Torrie (edited August 05, 2003).]

[mark pruitt]

Originally posted by paul d purvis:


Is that a recommendation on the right linux to use, as i am about to install
my first linux in a few days,

Paul, if you just starting out with Linux, I'd recommend a user-friendly version, like
Redhat or Mandrake. I have a Windows 98SE/Redhat 7.3 dual boot IBM laptop, and another
older Compaq LTE5280 that I use only for Dr. DOS 7.3 and Debian Linux (probably not the
distribution you want to try learning Linux on, although it could be done). Linux was
specifically designed to run on an Intel based machine; one reason user can get maximum
performance using Linux as their OS.

You can do a search for "Linux Distributions", and even "Linux CD Distributions" on your
favorite search engine and find a lot of places to learn about Linux.

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Mark Pruitt
[email protected]

[Paul Purvis]

hi mark,
thanks for the info

i purchased redhat linux 7. something sometime last year or so.
i wanted a ftp site and some other things as well, so i purchased it just
for the books to see how to install it. it was intimidating, linux, that is seemed
to be more than i could handle then. i purchased redhat 9 yesterday, and now that
they seem to be supporting more equipment, now seems to be the time to do an installation.
i really probably would not have done so, if powerbasic was not going to produce some software
for linux. it does seem that linux is going to be somekind of major server in my future and hopefully
maybe an desktop os as well for me. one other question, is linux linux or different versions different.
thanks.
paul



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[Michael Torrie]

I'd be happy to help out by answering linux questions that you have. I run mainly redhat 9 on my machines. You can e-mail me at torriem at chem dot byu dot edu.

Michael


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[Karl Lessmann]

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[This message has been edited by Karl Lessmann (edited September 23, 2003).]

[Paul Purvis]

AH,
Now after trying a few, i see the generics of linux.
I really hope this operating system can keep uniform like maybe
Unix has all these years, and it severs us all well into the future.
I can see now that there seems to be written on Red Hat than most other thing.
I just hope Microsoft can keep from buying out the major contributors and doing not so
keeping linux one of our major alternative operating systems.
I did install Red Hat and Mandrake and also purchased SUSIE and do not have
a favorite as of yet as i am still reading my butt off.
i am excited about the os, it will hopefully give my occupation the direction to go in towards
servers and backing up and communication between my offices, as we are still in a mostly msdos mode
operation and the chores of running the networks is getting larger by the year.

paul


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[This message has been edited by paul d purvis (edited August 20, 2003).]

[John Waalkes]

Just curious, but what's the advantage of using PB in a linux DOSbox? I'm
an old PB user (Hi Tom!) from way back who discovered linux and hasn't looked
back.

I lurk here occasionally, in the hopes that PBlinux will appear (so we can get on
with the writing of Duke Nukem Forever I suppose but it's been five years or
so...

So should I dust off my ooolllldddd version of PB and try it out in a DOSbox?
What can you do with it? And does PBvision work too?


Thanks

John Waalkes
jwaalkes at edge dot net


P.S. For you linux newbs, check out www.linuxquestions.org or Linux Coffee
Talk at http://ultra.litpixel.com:82/cgi-bin/lct/lct.pl


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[Hans Ruegg]

I am quite new to Linux, but out of curiosity I tried DOSEMU out.
I got everything to work, with one exception: I can't get any
sound through the PC speaker (PB's PLAY and SOUND statements do
not work). Is this not yet implemented in DOSEMU, or did I do
something wrong?

Hans Ruegg

[Michael Torrie]

I never use pc speaker sound anymore (don't even have the speaker hooked up) so I don't know. In the conf file for dosemu I thought I saw something about pc speaker emulation (via the sound card). Dosemu emulates a tradition soundblaster for your dos programs, so I would imagine that if you really needed it you could interface with that using some sound routines.



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[Paul Dixon]

John,
<<Just curious, but what's the advantage of using PB in a linux DOSbox?>>

To me, it would be that I could run PB/DOS programs on a Linix web server. Without PB/Linix I need to learn PERL or one of the other languages that I find tedious.

Having said that, I have not yet got this to work with my web sitew host.. .

Paul.

[Michael Torrie]

Just curious, but what's the advantage of using PB in a linux DOSbox? I'm
an old PB user (Hi Tom!) from way back who discovered linux and hasn't looked
back.

Good to hear. Linux to me (as far as programming and in relation to pb/dos goes) is what DOS was always trying to be and failing miserably. And windows too.

The only advantage of pb/dos under dosemu is that you can bring your old programs with you, and even write a few small programs. I'm not sure how to do it, but I suppose you could write CGI's with it (although the latency of firing up a whole dos box process plus dos plus your program would be very slow and inefficient -- and cgi's are inefficient anyway), but there are better languages for web development like PHP and if you're into huge projects, java.

Most of the people on this list regularly use pb/dos under a dos box in windows. dosemu allows us linux users to do the same.

I lurk here occasionally, in the hopes that PBlinux will appear (so we can get on
with the writing of Duke Nukem Forever I suppose but it's been five years or
so...

So should I dust off my ooolllldddd version of PB and try it out in a DOSbox?
What can you do with it? And does PBvision work too?

Sure why not. PBvision should work fine. The mouse works. I can even play games (complete with vga and sound).

I was once very excited for pb/linux. But in the meantime, I've switch most of my development to other languages, most of which are interpreted. For quick and dirty web apps, using pb/cc and cgi is a poor way to go; I prefer PHP. For larger apps, I know cgi isn't the way to go, although I'm still searching for that perfect tool. Even in the realm of full-blown graphical apps, interpreted languages such as python, ruby, or even (heaven forbid) perl, java, and c# or .net generally can build fast and complicated apps. In the windows world, and in the linux world, within 5 years most apps will be written in a virtual machine, rapid-development language like c# (yes even on linux) and java. That said, I will evaluate pb/linux when it's finally released. I'm afraid, though, that with the long delays, combined with the free availability of great tools (compilers, interpreters, environments, gui toolkits) which aren't available on windows, that it will be a tough sell. Compilers and development tools have been highly commoditized. Anyway, there's always a niche and I'm sure PB will fill it. I do like the clean syntax that PB has.


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[This message has been edited by Michael Torrie (edited September 09, 2003).]