DosBox

About
DosBox is an x86 emulator with up to VGA graphics and sound. It is licensed under version 2 of the GPL. The latest version available for RISC OS is version 0.74-1, which was ported as part of the Unix Porting Project. On a high-end PC, DosBox can emulate a fast 486 or early Pentium machine. On an IYONIX pc, games for the 286 and some 386 games should be playable. Performance is relatively low because the ARM processor has to do more work to emulate an x86 processor successfully. On the x86 platform, even when running Linux, emulating DOS on an early x86 processor is a simpler task. Due to the high memory requirement of current versions DosBox will only run on RISC OS 5 capable hardware. Which at the moment includes the Iyonix and Beagleboard based hardware.

The DosBox !Help file explains how to set up sound and how to map a RISC OS directory as a DOS drive letter. CD support is also available (? I believe – still haven't double-checked. Simon Smith 19:28, 27 July 2007 (BST))

Downloads

 * DosBox 0.74-1

The DosBox homepage is http://dosbox.sourceforge.net.

There is an XML dump of the DosBox compatibility database available at http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/game_database.xml. n.b. file size 800–900kB, updated daily.

Tip: While DosBox was primarily intended as an x86 emulator for x86 games, it should be able to handle a lot of other DOS programs as well, including many command line utilities.

Hardware alternatives
While other emulators are available, no other software emulators directly equivalent to DosBox exist. However, RiscPC users with x86 second processors will have a hardware DOS environment available, and there are significant numbers of RISC OS users who use RISC OS itself under emulation (e.g. via VirtualAcorn). The latter gives easier access to a native DOS (or DOS-like environment via Windows) than that enjoyed by owners of ARM-based RISC OS machines.