Shadow Lord
Veteran Member
Hello All,
I recently ran across vDOS and went down the DOS on x64 rabbit hole. For those of you that don't know vDOS is a limited DOS emulator to allow you to run text based dos programs in Windows x64 (Vista, 7, 8.x, 10 and 11) without the NTVDM found in the x32 version. It isn't a full fledged machine emulator as far as I can tell. It is more analagous to a wrapper (although I could be wrong here as it is based on DOSBOX).
Prior to this I have always used a VMWARE machine with a full DOS and WfW install. This provided a "real" enough environment to try out programs or mess around with configurations. Of course an emulated machine is never as good as the real thing. Things that worked on actual HW would fail in the emulator. For game play I use real HW.
The VMWare solution is nice and does let me to do just about everything (including playing limited games). It does fail in that it doesn't emulate all HW (i.e. I can setup MSLANMAN with the VMWARE NIC but can't mess around with configuring a 3COM NIC like I use in my real HW). It is cumbersome though to have to boot a whole VM to run something. This is where I think a wrapper like vDOS comes in to play. With vDOS you can have an icon on your desktop that can be clicked to run one DOS program. Technically you could set it up to run multiple dos programs from one instance of the program but then it loses its utility and appeal IMHO. Of course the one big down side is that I don't believe it emulates any graphics so you are limited to pure text programs (i.e. Autocad for DOS is out...)
While looking at vDOS I found another fork call vDOSPlus that is not as frequently updated/maintained but is more feature rich. The author of vDOSPlus also has a fork of DOSBOX that is more of a general purpose emulator (i.e. not geared toward just games) and allows you to even run Win9x under it.
So what do you guys use for your DOS fix when you can't get to real HW? Do you go for a full VM like VMWare or PCE? Or a psuedo VM like DOSBOX? With the options of a full VM or DOSBOX is there even a point in having a wrapper like vDOS? More importantly why do you use what you use?
I recently ran across vDOS and went down the DOS on x64 rabbit hole. For those of you that don't know vDOS is a limited DOS emulator to allow you to run text based dos programs in Windows x64 (Vista, 7, 8.x, 10 and 11) without the NTVDM found in the x32 version. It isn't a full fledged machine emulator as far as I can tell. It is more analagous to a wrapper (although I could be wrong here as it is based on DOSBOX).
Prior to this I have always used a VMWARE machine with a full DOS and WfW install. This provided a "real" enough environment to try out programs or mess around with configurations. Of course an emulated machine is never as good as the real thing. Things that worked on actual HW would fail in the emulator. For game play I use real HW.
The VMWare solution is nice and does let me to do just about everything (including playing limited games). It does fail in that it doesn't emulate all HW (i.e. I can setup MSLANMAN with the VMWARE NIC but can't mess around with configuring a 3COM NIC like I use in my real HW). It is cumbersome though to have to boot a whole VM to run something. This is where I think a wrapper like vDOS comes in to play. With vDOS you can have an icon on your desktop that can be clicked to run one DOS program. Technically you could set it up to run multiple dos programs from one instance of the program but then it loses its utility and appeal IMHO. Of course the one big down side is that I don't believe it emulates any graphics so you are limited to pure text programs (i.e. Autocad for DOS is out...)
While looking at vDOS I found another fork call vDOSPlus that is not as frequently updated/maintained but is more feature rich. The author of vDOSPlus also has a fork of DOSBOX that is more of a general purpose emulator (i.e. not geared toward just games) and allows you to even run Win9x under it.
So what do you guys use for your DOS fix when you can't get to real HW? Do you go for a full VM like VMWare or PCE? Or a psuedo VM like DOSBOX? With the options of a full VM or DOSBOX is there even a point in having a wrapper like vDOS? More importantly why do you use what you use?